Does Digitalization Enhance (Negativity) Bias of the News Media? Investigating Journalistic Decision Making Under Different Incentive Schemes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Marie Müller
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Media ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Incentive Schemes

Exploring Managerial Attitudes Toward Various Participation Mechanisms in Response to Citizen Satisfaction Signals on Public Service Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 009539972110483
Author(s):  
Youngmin Oh ◽  
Heontae Shin ◽  
Jongsun Park
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Service Quality ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Positive Signal ◽  
Citizen Satisfaction ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Participation Mechanisms

This study identifies the impacts of different citizen satisfaction signals (positive/negative) on managers’ agreement to use various participation channels. Citizen satisfaction with public service quality plays an essential role in managers’ accountability expectations. Accordingly, it is crucial to examine how public managers use participation mechanisms, reacting to citizen satisfaction signals on public service quality. The results confirm a negativity bias: Managers are more reactive to citizens’ negative signals than a positive signal in their service quality evaluations. However, the negative signal’s effect does not reach the participation tools, where the degree of their decision-making is highly delegated to citizens.

scholarly journals Biased evaluations emerge from inferring hidden causes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeon Soon Shin ◽  
Yael Niv
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Inference Process ◽  
Inference Model ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Environmental Statistics ◽  
Model Average ◽  
Positive Experiences

How do we evaluate a group of people after having positive experiences with some members and negative experiences with others? In particular, how do rare experiences with members who stand out (e.g., negative experiences when most are positive) influence the overall impression we have of the group? Here, we show that such rare events may be overweighted due to normative inference of the hidden, or latent, causes that are believed to generate the observed events. We propose a Bayesian latent-cause inference model that learns environmental statistics by combining highly similar events together and separating rare or highly variable observations. The model predicts that group evaluations that rely on averaging inferred latent causes will overweight variable events. We empirically tested these model-derived predictions in four decision-making experiments, where subjects observed a sequence of social (Exp 1 to 3) or non-social (Exp 4) behaviors and were subsequently asked to estimate the average of observed values. As predicted by our latent-cause model, average estimation was biased toward rare and highly variable events when observing social behaviors. We then showed that tracking of a single summary value, instead of parsing events into distinct latent causes, eliminates the bias. These results suggest that biases in evaluations of social groups, such as negativity bias, may arise from the causal inference process of the group.

Political Agenda Setting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Maurer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Media Agenda ◽  
Political Decision Making

Political agenda setting is the part of agenda-setting research that refers to the influence of the media agenda on the agenda of political actors. More precisely, the central question of political agenda-setting research is whether political actors adopt the issue agenda of the news media in various aspects ranging from communicating about issues that are prominently discussed in the news media to prioritizing issues from the news media agenda in political decision making. Although such effects have been studied under different labels (agenda building, policy agenda setting) for several decades, research in this field has recently increased significantly based on a new theoretical model introducing the term political agenda setting. Studies based on that model usually find effects of media coverage on the attention political actors pay to various issues, but at the same time point to a number of contingent conditions. First, as found in research on public agenda setting, there is an influence of characteristics of news media (e.g., television news vs. print media) and issues (e.g., obtrusive vs. unobtrusive issues). Second, there is an influence of characteristics of the political context (e.g., government vs. oppositional parties) and characteristics of individual politicians (e.g., generalists vs. specialists). Third, the findings of studies on the political agenda-setting effect differ, depending on which aspects of the political agenda are under examination (e.g., social media messages vs. political decision making).

Naming Crime Suspects in the News

2017 ◽  
pp. 207-225
Author(s):  
Robin Blom
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Search ◽  
Ethics Codes ◽  
Search Results ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Decision Making Processes

Whereas some news outlets fully identify crime suspects with name, age, address, and other personal details, other news outlets refuse to fully identify any crime suspect—or even people who have been convicted for a crime. News media from a variety of countries have accused and fully identified people of being responsible for crimes, although those persons turned out to be innocent. Yet, when someone types the names of those people in online search engines, for many, stories containing the accusations will turn up at the top of the search results. This chapter examines the positive and negative aspects from those practices by examining journalistic routines in a variety of countries, such as the United States, Nigeria, and The Netherlands. This analysis demonstrates that important ethical imperatives—often represented in ethics codes of professional journalism organizations—can be contradictory in these decision-making processes. Journalists need to weigh whether they would like to “seek truth and report it” or “minimize harm” when describing crime suspects.

The news media and decision making

2017 ◽  
pp. 259-272
Author(s):  
Vlastimil Nečas ◽  
Tomáš Trampota
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Media

Gender Stereotyping in Political Decision Making

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nichole M. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Political Decision Making

Women are under-represented at every level of elected office in the United States. As of 2018, women held just under 20% of seats in Congress, 25% of state legislative seats across the country, only six women serve as governor, and, of course, a woman has yet to win the presidency. The political under-representation of women is not unique to the American context. Indeed, women’s under-representation is a feature of other Western Democracies. Even under the leadership of female prime ministers, women hold only 32% of seats in the United Kingdom parliament and 31% of seats in the German parliament. Conventional wisdom suggests that feminine stereotypes may disadvantage female candidates. Feminine stereotypes characterize women as sensitive, emotional, and weak, and these are qualities voters do not traditionally associate with political leadership. Rather, voters associate political leadership with masculine traits such as being tough, aggressive, or assertive. The extent to which voters use these stereotypes in political decision making in the American context is not entirely clear. There are three ways that feminine and masculine stereotypes can affect political decision making: candidate strategies, campaign news coverage, and vote choice decision. The alignment between masculine stereotypes and political leadership frequently pressures female candidates to emphasize masculine qualities over feminine qualities in campaign messages. Motivating these masculine messages is the perception that voters see female candidates as lacking the masculine qualities voters desire in political leaders. Male candidates, because of the alignment between masculinity and leadership roles, do not face this pressure. Female candidates will, however, highlight feminine stereotypes when these strategies will afford them a distinct electoral advantage. The use of masculinity in candidate strategy leads the news media, in turn, to use masculine stereotypes rather than feminine stereotypes in their coverage of both female and male candidates. The ways that candidates and the news media engage with gender stereotypes affects how voters use these concepts to form impressions of female and male candidates. Voters will use feminine stereotypes as heuristics to form impressions of the ideological and issue priorities of female candidates. Feminine stereotypes can hurt the electoral prospects of female candidates, but the negative effect of feminine stereotypes only occurs under a limited set of conditions. Voters will use feminine stereotypes to rate female candidates negatively when female candidates explicitly emphasize feminine qualities, such as being warm or compassionate, in campaign messages. But, voters respond positively to female candidates who emphasize positive masculine qualities. In sum, whether gender stereotypes affect voter decision-making depends on the extent to which voters see messages, either from campaigns or the news media, that reflect femininity or masculinity.

scholarly journals Interrogating the efficiency paradigm : a study of language analysis as evidence in refugee status determination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Colleen Pease
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Media ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
The Subject

In 1993, Sweden commenced the unprecedented practice of using Language Analysis (LA) as evidence in refugee status determination. Since that time, Western governments trying to cope with the perceived refugee crisis have similarly adopted the tool to corroborate and undermine the nationality claims of asylum seekers crossing borders without identity documents. During this same period, language professionals, lawyers, various news media, and others across the globe have proceeded to fuel international controversy on the subject, largely challenging the linguistic integrity of the tool, while investing less energy addressing the political context of use, as well as the implications for violations of refugee rights. In 2007, Canada reflected prioritized concerns for efficiency when it made public a pilot project to address the value of this language tool in aiding status decision-making. This paper interrogates the Canadian efficiency paradigm through the Australian lens of LA in practice. In exposing the ethical and legal sites of likely disengagement should Canada proceed with implementation, this paper cautions against LA becoming the most recent assault on a Canadian protection regime already under siege.

Too close for comfort: journalists’ ethical challenges in regional Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2096746
Author(s):  
Jane Stephens (Fynes-Clinton) ◽  
Rosanna Natoli ◽  
Michele Gilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
News Media ◽  
New South ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Story Writing ◽  
Regional Australia

Staff and budget cutbacks and systemic changes in news media have been widely documented by journalists and scholars, and this qualitative study aims to understand the empirical experience of journalists outside the cities, where isolation, small staff, tight budgets and close communities are the rule. This article reports on part of a study that investigated the experience of journalists in remote and regional media outlets in Queensland and New South Wales. This article explores the more pointed ethical difficulties journalists experience in regional areas, finding these conundrums add layers to decision-making and complexity in the source–journalist relationships. Journalists in regional and remote areas report feeling pressure to take shortcuts in their story writing due to time restraints, to sensationalise or angle stories to suit management agendas, or to write clickbait headlines. They identified these as challenges to their professional practice.

Women's participation at decision making level in the news media of Bangladesh

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-21
Author(s):  
Muhammad Anwarus Salam ◽  
Kazi Nafia Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Media ◽  
Women's Participation
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