Gender Differences in the Polarizing Effects of Social Media Usage

• In Event: The Moderating Role of Gender in Political Communication

Abstract

Settle (2018) demonstrates that the defining characteristics of political communication on the Facebook News Feed are uniquely suited to facilitate psychological processes of polarization: identity formation and reinforcement, biased information processing, and social inference and judgment. Facebook users—regardless of their level of political sophistication—draw inferences about the political inclinations of users who post political, as well as politicized and seemingly apolitical, content to the News Feed. Facebook users perceive widely recognizable signals about the kinds of preferences that map to partisan views, drawing inferences that are generally accurate but biased in predictable ways. Three cognitive biases in particular shape Facebook users’ political inferences: the outgroup homogeneity effect, perceived polarization, and the false consensus effect. For Americans who choose to ignore politics, Facebook provides the necessary content and context to distort perspectives of the political landscape.

Are men and women equally susceptible to these biases? Previous research notes that while women are more likely to use Facebook, they are less likely to report political engagement on social media. Moreover, women may be less likely to engage politically in visible ways based on higher average rates of concern about offending others. What is the consequence of these differential usage patterns on the way men and women process information and form judgments about the political views of their social connections on the site?

In this paper, we explore whether gender differences in Facebook usage behavior affect the inferences that Facebook members make about each other based on the politically-relevant content that they post. In a series of two studies conducted in the spring and fall of 2016, subjects were asked to make inferences about the political views of anonymous Facebook users based solely on the content these users posted. We explore whether there are systematic differences in the way that men and women process content on Facebook. First, we evaluate whether there are gender differences in the recognition of the kind of content that people consider to be about politics. Second, we assess whether men and women are equally likely to attribute partisanship to other users based on their posted content. Finally, we test whether men and women are equally likely to be biased in assessing the extremity and consistency of others’ political views.

Author

• Jaime E. Settle, College of William & Mary