The Role of Regulatory Focus, Self-Esteem, and Mood in Social Comparisons with Mediated Extreme Targets — Selective Exposure to News about the Rich and the Poor

In a quasi-experiment, high-school students’ (N=252) chronic regulatory focus, self-esteem, and mood were taken into account to predict patterns of selective exposure to headlines about the rich and poor. Partly consistent with Gerber et al. (2017) meta-analysis, there is a strong preference for upward choices in a negative mood. We nuanced this result by referring to the role of news valence in selective exposure demonstrating that the selection of negative news about the rich is typical in negative mood. Results regarding the selective exposure to headlines about the poor corroborate only with Wheeler and Miyakes’ (1992) finding that respondents selected down-ward comparison targets in a positive mood. The selective exposure self- and affect-management model (SESAM, Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015) may serve as a theoretical framework for explaining the result. Besides income inequality literature, the discussion is based on the Wu et al. (2018) finding, and it suggests that the selection of headlines about the rich could be linked to a positive stereotyping process. We would call this process of accepting one’s own culture as it is by social comparisons to make the unequal word supportable as soothing social comparison. The same logic was applied to the poor.