Adolescents’ processing of and response to incidentally encountered social media content – Differentiating between polarizing and depolarizing incidental social media exposure effects

Social media platforms have been argued to facilitate polarization processes, as they allow people to cocoon themselves with like-minded messages, thereby creating echo chambers in which exposure to attitude-incongruent information is minimal and existing attitudes tend to be reinforced. At the same time, however, the abundance of news and user-generated content on social media makes it increasingly likely that individuals incidentally encounter information without actively searching for it. Such incidental exposure (IE) may operate as an antecedent to more cross-cutting media diets and can create opportunities for initially uninterested audiences to encounter and engage with news, potentially diminishing existing knowledge and engagement gaps. The idea that social media can facilitate cross-cutting exposure and mobilize issue-engagement among uninterested users runs counter to the idea that social media facilitate and contribute to polarization. To date, no scholarly consensus exists as to whether IE can increase ideological diversity and in doing so contribute to depolarized audiences. Therefore, the current project aims to a/ distinguish different types of IE and explore conditions under which they result in attitude-discrepant vs. congruent climate exposure and b/examine whether incidentally encountered attitude-discrepant/congruent climate content results in polarizing or depolarizing outcomes, paying specific attention to the mediating role of cognitive response states.