The emergence of disinformation challenges today’s democracies. Selective exposure research assumes that psychological biases cause people to turn to attitude-reinforcing disinformation, though studies indicate that this only holds true for small niches of online audiences. However, when online, unbiased users as well may encounter disinformation, which for them appear to be attitude-challenging. How unbiased online users experience and cope with dissonance triggered by this, and whether this affects their pre-existing attitudes, has hardly been explored. This research gap is addressed using the polarized topic of climate change as an example. An experimental research design is applied combining stimulus exposure, survey research, eye tracking, and interviews (n = 50). The findings indicate that unbiased users are not entirely resistant to disinformation influence. However, attitude effects could not be fully explained by selection behavior but instead through different feelings and strategies of coping with dissonance and patterns of performing online information searches.

中文翻译：

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误导公正：在气候变化虚假信息曝光后，在线用户如何体验和应对不和谐

虚假信息的出现挑战了当今的民主国家。选择性暴露研究假设心理偏见会导致人们转向强化态度的虚假信息，尽管研究表明这仅适用于小部分在线受众。然而，在上网时，公正的用户也可能会遇到虚假信息，这对他们来说似乎是一种态度挑战。没有偏见的在线用户如何体验和应对由此引发的不和谐，以及这是否会影响他们先前存在的态度，几乎没有人探讨过。以气候变化这一两极分化的话题为例，解决了这一研究空白。结合刺激暴露、调查研​​究、眼动追踪和访谈（n = 50)。调查结果表明，公正的用户并不完全抵抗虚假信息的影响。然而，态度效应并不能完全用选择行为来解释，而是通过不同的感受和应对不和谐的策略以及进行在线信息搜索的模式来解释。