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.

摘要

个性化是指在新闻报道中加入普通人的情感案例研究，增加新闻的生动性和情感负荷，引起新闻消费者的认同和同情的新闻实践。先前的研究表明，新闻故事的个性化增加了新闻受众的集体主义（与个人主义相比）因果归因。作为回应，进行了一项实验，在刺激呈现和开放式参与者反应之间有一周的时间延迟，以检查新闻个性化对新闻消费者如何归因于社会问题的原因的影响。参与者 (N = 80) 特质同理心作为附加因素包括在内。