Media Environment, Dual Process and Polarization: A Computational Approach

Abstract

News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of Motivated Reasoning and Analytic/Intuitive Reasoning. The result shows that as the media environment moves towards the Post-Truth world, the problem of political polarization becomes exacerbated.