Effects of A High-Person-Centered Response to Commenters Who Disagree on Readers’ Positive Attitudes toward A News Outlet’s Facebook Page

Abstract

This study examined what type of response to commenters who disagree led to more positive attitudes toward a news organization’s Facebook page. Results of two experiments, one in Germany (n = 764) and one in the United States (n = 763), found that a high-person-centered (HPC) response, which acknowledges people’s emotions, led to more positive attitudes toward the news organization’s Facebook page, compared with a low-person-centered (LPC) response, which dismisses people’s feelings. This held true for both German and American participants, regardless of whether the comments were civil or not. In both countries, positive evaluations of the organization’s Facebook page were heightened if journalists, rather than news users, responded to the commenters. Results are discussed in relation to the verbal person-centered (VPC) theory of social supportive outcomes.

Keywords:

• incivility
• online journalism
• Facebook
• online commenters

Acknowledgments

This article is a project of the Center for Media Engagement (CME) in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. The authors thank CME Director Natalie (Talia) Stroud and the CME team for supporting this project and providing valuable feedback. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication at its annual conference, August 2019, Toronto, Canada.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The U.S. portion of this project was funded through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the German portion was funded by the Center for Media Convergence at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.