This dissertation extends the media effects literature into the realm of social media. Scholars have long known that partisan news contributes to political polarization, but claim that such effects are often limited to those who tune into politics. Social media, however, can filter political information to those typically uninterested in politics. Because social media feature entertainment and political news in the same space, entertainment-seekers may inadvertently see political news that they normally avoid in traditional media contexts. Through a combination of observational research, survey experiments, and field experiments, I demonstrate that social media facilitate personal influence, drawing new audiences to political news. This increased exposure to partisan media contributes to political polarization, regardless of the ideological congruence between source and receiver, or of news- or entertainment-seeking habits of the audience. But the most important contributions of this dissertation are how it demonstrates the need for scholars to use innovative methods that incorporate personal influence into social media studies, and that it draws scholarly attention to inadvertent media effects for entertainment-seeking audiences. Social media bring political news to new audiences numbering in the millions. Political communication scholars would be remiss not to investigate their influence. / Political Science

The AICPA recently released new authoritative audit guidance related to group audits of nonpublic organizations which requires group engagement teams to be involved in the work of a component auditor, including certain minimum baseline requirements and the option for more extensive involvement at the group auditor's discretion. Accordingly, group audits create a scenario where auditors are under the direct oversight of a component audit supervisor, yet their work product is monitored and used by the group engagement team when expressing an opinion on the group financial statements. To my knowledge, prior accounting research has not explored the complexity of auditor decision making in a group audit scenario. Drawing on theory from motivated reasoning, this study investigates how the level of group engagement team involvement in component audit work may influence auditor decision making when a component audit supervisor has expressed preferences for more or less professional skepticism during the component audit process. Prior research in non-group audit settings finds the preferences of audit supervisors can influence the skepticism exhibited by their subordinates. However, in a group audit setting I find that the effects of component supervisor preferences interact with the level of group engagement team involvement in component auditors' work to influence component auditors' budgeted audit hours and planned substantive audit procedures. Results showed that during an accounts receivable audit planning task, auditors who faced an optimistic component supervisor recommended the use of more audit hours and suggested confirming a greater percentage of the accounts receivable balance when a group engagement team chose to be more actively involved in the component audit process than when the group engagement team chose only to review component audit work. However, there were no differences in budgeted audit hours or planned audit procedures when auditors faced a skeptical component supervisor, regardless of the level of group engagement team involvement. Thus, increased involvement of the group engagement team mitigated the influence of an optimistic component supervisor on auditor decision making, but did not significantly influence component auditor judgments when auditors faced a more conservative component supervisor. Path analyses indicated this phenomenon was caused by auditors' sense of pressure to reach appropriate audit conclusions induced by the increased involvement of the group engagement team. These results suggest that the effects of supervisor preferences are complex within a group audit environment, such that the nature of instructions received from a group engagement team may mitigate the effects of supervisor preferences on component auditor decision making. This research has implications for audit practice as it relates to the implementation of the new group audit standard as well as for regulators who establish future auditing guidance. / Ph. D.

This dissertation seeks to understand how issue publics contribute to citizen competence and the functioning of democracy. In the first part of the dissertation, a new measurement was constructed by theoretically and empirically analyzing the attributes of issue public members. Through the hypotheses testing, the new measure was more reliable in identifying issue public members compared to previous measurement strategies. Employing the new measure, results show that issue public members with concern about a specific issue, exercised their issue-specificity in seeking information (i.e., issue-based selectivity) with exposure to both attitude-consistent and counter-attitudinal perspectives. Issue public membership also had significant effects on issue-specific knowledge, and generating rationales for their own and other's oppositional viewpoints. These direct effects were mediated by issue-based selectivity. The relationships highlight the importance of issue publics in contributing to the deliberative democracy. In addition, issue publics play a significant role in contributing to the participatory democracy in that issue public members have greater intentions to participate in issue-related activities than nonmembers. However, while issue publics come close to solve the deliberative-participatory paradox, it was found that their information selectivity and argument generation were unbalanced in a way of favoring pro-attitudinal perspectives over counter-attitudinal perspectives. The second part of the dissertation examined conditional factors--accuracy and directional goals in affecting information selectivity and processing. The findings show that directional goals influenced participants to apply either the strategies of selective approach or selective avoidance to seek information depending on the issue. Accuracy goals exerted a main effect on the issue that is relatively less controversial and less obtrusive. They also interacted with issue public membership in influencing the less controversial and less obtrusive issue. Argument generation was not affected by accuracy or directional goals. Overall, through conceptualizing citizens as members of different issue publics, individuals are more competent then we thought. Their intrinsic interest in an issue serves as a strong factor affecting their information selectivity, information processing, and political actions. Despite finding an optimistic role for issue publics in the democratic process, their limitations also should be recognized. The implications for the deliberative and participatory democracy are discussed.

Americans are not financially prepared for retirement and the World Economic Forum (2019) is forecasting the US retirement savings gap to grow consistently for the next three decades. Addressing this retirement savings gap will almost certainly require individuals to increase their retirement savings rate. Embracing this increased individual accountability for retirement savings is found in this research to lead to a higher retirement savings intention. However, this research also found that perceptions about who is accountable for the retirement savings gap is not uniform, but rather is polarized along political lines. Those who affiliate with the Republican party believe relatively more strongly in individual accountability for retirement saving while those who affiliate with the Democratic party believe more strongly in the accountability of institutions like the government, Wall Street and employers. This research experiments with temporal framing as a novel mechanism for disengaging respondents from these politically affiliated retirement savings accountability beliefs, and by doing so, influencing their retirement saving intentions. Temporal framing was chosen as a mechanism for moderating politically affiliated beliefs about perceived accountability for retirement saving because distal temporal framing has been shown in prior research (Roh, McComas, Rickard & Decker, 2015) to be effective in reducing entrenched resistance. Distal framing in this research was expected to reduce resistance to ‘mismatched’ messages – which are ones that counter existing politically affiliated beliefs ab The results confirm a clear distinction between Republican affiliated respondents, who place high accountability for the retirement saving gap on individuals and low accountability on institutions, and Democrat affiliated respondents, who consider both individuals and institutions as accountable. Furthermore, the research confirms that self-identified political affiliation does not influence the importance that respondents placed on retirement savings. And for both political affiliations, a higher perceived individual accountability for retirement savings is associated with an increased retirement savings priority. However, temporal framing as a mechanism for moderating politically affiliated beliefs about accountability was not effective as applied in this research, possibly because the tested messages were not sufficiently persuasive. The findings from this research can be applied by practitioners to set the tone and content of messages about retirement savings, to target messages to the most receptive audiences, and to advance academic understanding of the influence of proximate and distal message framing. And most importantly, this research makes a small but meaningful contribution towards understanding how to ensure a dignified retirement for all Americans. / Business Administration/Marketing

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The aim of this dissertation was to address a theoretical debate on belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency for people to be influenced by their prior beliefs when engaged in deductive reasoning. Deduction is the act of drawing necessary conclusions from premises which are meant to be assumed as true. Given that the logical validity of an argument is independent of its content, being influenced by your prior beliefs in such content is considered a bias. Traditional theories posit there are two belief bias components. Motivated reasoning is the tendency to reason better for arguments with unbelievable conclusions relative to arguments with believable conclusions. Response bias is the tendency to accept believable arguments and to reject unbelievable arguments. Dube et al. (2010) pointed out critical methodological problems that undermine evidence for traditional theories. Using signal detection theory (SDT), they found evidence for response bias only. We adopted the SDT method to compare the viability of the traditional and the response bias accounts. In Chapter 1 the relevant literature is reviewed. In Chapter 2 four experiments which employed a novel SDT-based forced choice reasoning method are presented, showing evidence compatible with motivated reasoning. In Chapter 3 four experiments which used the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) method are presented. Crucially, cognitive ability turned out to be linked to motivated reasoning. In Chapter 4 three experiments are presented in which we investigated the impact of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style on belief bias, concluding that cognitive style mediated the effects of cognitive ability on motivated reasoning. In Chapter 5 we discuss our findings in light of a novel individual differences account of belief bias. We conclude that using the appropriate measurement method and taking individual differences into account are two key elements to furthering our understanding of belief bias, human reasoning, and cognitive psychology in general.

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L’objectif général de cette thèse de doctorat est de mieux comprendre comment le public interprète les nouvelles scientifiques portant sur la génétique humaine, plus précisément les nouvelles portant sur la génétique des comportements et celles portant sur la génétique des groupes raciaux. L’ouvrage prend la forme d’une thèse par article. Le Chapitre 1 introduit le lecteur aux buts et aux pratiques de la vulgarisation scientifique, présente un sommaire de la recherche sur les effets des médias, résume les principaux travaux produits par le champ de la génopolitique, et définit la structure des croyances du public à l’égard de l’influence de la génétique sur les traits humains. Le Chapitre 2 présente les fondements de la méthode expérimentale, il en explique les atouts et il offre des exemples de différents types de devis expérimentaux utilisés en science politique. Toutes les recherches produites dans cette thèse reposent au moins en partie sur cette méthode. Le Chapitre 3 présente les résultats d’une expérience de sondage qui vise à mesurer l’effet de la lecture d’une nouvelle à propos de la recherche en génétique des comportements sur des participants. L’étude démontre que le public interprète la nouvelle avec maladresse et tend à généraliser l’influence de la génétique à d’autres traits humains qui n’y sont pas mentionnés. J’avance l’hypothèse qu’un raccourci psychologique amplement documenté puisse expliquer cette réaction : l’heuristique de l’ancrage et de l’ajustement. Le Chapitre 4 présente lui aussi les résultats d’une expérience de sondage. L’étude consiste à manipuler certaines informations du contenu d’une nouvelle sur la génopolitique de manière à vérifier si certains éléments sont particulièrement susceptibles de mener à la généralisation hâtive mise en évidence dans le Chapitre 3. Les analyses suggèrent que cette généralisation est amplifiée lorsque la nouvelle présente de hauts niveaux d’héritabilité tirés d’études de jumeaux, ainsi que lorsqu’elle présente des travaux de génétique des populations visant à étudier l’origine des différences géographiques. Ce chapitre présente des recommandations à l’égard des journalistes scientifiques. Le Chapitre 5 s’intéresse à un aspect différent de la génétique humaine : celui de la génétique des races. L’objectif de cette recherche est de comprendre comment le public réagit aux travaux qui invalident l’idée selon laquelle les humains sont divisés en différentes races génétiquement distinctes. Les analyses de données transversales ainsi que les résultats d’une expérience de sondage convergent et indiquent que les conservateurs et les libéraux réagissent de manière diamétralement opposée à cette information. D’un côté, les libéraux acceptent le constat scientifique et réduisent leur impression que la génétique explique en partie les inégalités sociales; de l’autre, les conservateurs rejettent l’argument avec une intensité si forte que le rôle qu’ils attribuent aux différences génétiques s’en voit bonifié. Ces résultats sont interprétés à partir de la théorie du raisonnement motivé. Enfin, le Chapitre 6 résume les principaux constats, met en évidence les contributions que ma thèse apporte à la science politique et à la communication scientifique, et présente quelques pistes pour la recherche future. / The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to improve our understanding of how the public interprets scientific news about human genetics, specifically, behavioral genetics and the genetic underpinnings of racial groups. The core of the dissertation is a collection of three research articles and one book chapter. Chapter 1 introduces the readers to the goals and practices of science journalism, presents a summary of the literature on media effects, summarizes research on genopolitics, and discusses findings in public opinion on how people understand genetic influence on human characteristics. Chapter 2 presents the rationale behind the experimental method, explains its pros and cons, and provides examples of how different types of research designs have been used in political science. All the empirical evidence presented in this dissertation rests at least in part on experiments. Chapter 3 presents the results of a survey experiment that aims to measure the effects on individuals of reading a news article about behavioral genetics research. The study suggests that the public has difficulty in making sense of such research findings. The results show that participants tend to generalize the conclusions of one particular genetic study to other characteristics not mentioned by the study. I hypothesize that these results can be explained by a well-known and widely documented psychological process: the use of anchoring and adjustment heuristics. Chapter 4 presents the results of a second survey experiment. This experiment manipulates the content of a news article about behavioral genetics. The purpose of the manipulation is to test whether particular aspects of article’s message are more likely than others to cause the hasty generalizations revealed in Chapter 3. The findings show that the tendency to generalization is greater when the news presents high heritability estimates derived from twin studies or insights from research using population genetics methods to account for aggregate geographic difference. Based on these findings, the chapter develops recommendations for science journalists interested in covering behavioral genetics. Chapter 5 focuses on a different field of human genetic research, namely, that investigating the genetic bases of racial differences. The chapter’s aim is to improve our understanding of how the public reacts when exposed to scientific claims arguing against the idea that that human beings belong to different, genetically distinct races. Both cross sectional survey data and experimental data suggest that conservatives and liberals react to this information in opposing ways. Liberals tend to accept such arguments and temper their beliefs that genetic differences account for racial inequalities. By contrast, conservatives reject the arguments so strongly that exposure to them actually strengthens these citizens’ beliefs that genetics explain a proportion of racial inequality. These results are interpreted from the perspective of motivated reasoning theory. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes the main findings of the doctoral dissertation, highlights its contribution to the discipline of political science and the field of science communication, and suggests directions for future research.