Who is responsible? The impact of emotional personalization on explaining the origins of social problems

ABSTRACT

Personalization refers to the journalistic practice of including emotional case studies of ordinary people in news stories, increasing vividness and emotional charge of news and eliciting identification and empathy in news consumers. Previous research suggests that personalization of news stories increases collectivistic (compared with individualistic) causal attributions by the news audience. In response, an experiment was conducted with a week time delay between stimuli presentation and open-ended participant responses to examine the influence of news personalization on how news consumers attribute causes for social issues. Participant (N = 80) trait empathy was included as an additional factor. Findings show that participants with high trait empathy expressed a greater shift to collectivistic attribution after watching personalized news stories than participants with low trait empathy, suggesting that individual differences in trait empathy may be an important factor in how individuals construct their own understanding of social problems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The assessment of trait empathy has held the attention of scholars for many years. A number of scaled items have been developed and weaknesses have come to light over the course of many attempts to validate these scales (Lawrence et al., 2004). For this reason, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) designed a new self-report questionnaire – the Empathy Quotient (EQ) – that was validated to measure trait empathy in adults with normal intelligence (Lawrence et al., 2004). The EQ-scale not only incorporates the multidimensional nature of empathy but also includes a clinical application. In addition, Lawrence et al. (2004) identified an emotional reactivity dimension of the index to measure emotional reaction tendencies to people encountered in news stories.

² Because pre-exposure responses were reported before exposure to stimuli, these responsibility attributions were not directly related to specific news stories used in the current study. In other words, pre-exposure responses were a measure of individual tendencies to attribute social problems collectivistically or individualistically, rather than their immediate responses to each news story. Therefore, the use of differenced scores (i.e. subtracting pre-exposure from post-exposure score) to test the impact of news story personalization would not be beneficial.