Attending the NCA Convention? Don’t miss these presentations by our CME team members.
Thursday, November 14
The Impact of Relationship Quality and Partisan In-group/Out-group Perception on Perceived Interpersonal Competence in Political Conversation
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 343
Although rational-choice models of political behavior provide more sophisticated measurements of the public’s political knowledge, something is missing in the explanation of the connection between how ordinary citizens communicate about politics in close relationships and what influences their competency to discuss politics based on what they know. Despite increasing research in communication studies directed toward the effects of discussions among individuals, little attention has been directed to individuals as competent communicators. T examine how individuals converse about politics in close relationships and how they determine if their political conversations are successful, the current study investigates appropriateness and efficiency criteria to capture the quality of communication. Additionally, potential factors that may influence the quality of political conversations, such as perceived relationship quality, political partisanship, and types of close relationships, are also examined. Based on a survey of 172 undergraduate students, findings suggest seemingly counter-intuitive associations: (a) negative correlations between relationship quality and evaluations of communication competency and (b) decreased communication competency when the participants have the same party identification with their partner. Implications of this study address underlying mechanisms with regard to how individuals perceive political communication with their close others in casual settings.
Author: Yujin Kim, University of Texas, Austin
Friday, November 15
Privacy, Harm, and the Uses of Publicity in Nonconsensual Pornography
8:00 AM – 9:15 AM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 327
This paper will investigate the complex terrain of privacy in relation to nonconsensual or “revenge” pornography, as well as the weaponization of publicity and sharing that underwrites many contemporary digital media practices. Of particular interest to this project will be actual and potential artistic uses of nonconsensual content in social and political criticism, an important and overlooked feature in the debates over the free speech implications of potentially harmful or embarrassing nonconsensual content.
Author: Scott Stroud, University of Texas, Austin
Saturday, November 16
Pathways to Deeper News Engagement: Factors Influencing Click Behaviors on News Sites
9:30 AM – 10:45 AM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 331
This study uses a field experiment conducted on the article pages of seven local broadcast news sites to examine how the ways in which individuals arrive at news sites (e.g. social, search, another site) influence them to click on news. Results indicate that engaging with news in different ways affects whether individuals click to read more news. These findings build on the heuristic-systematic model of information processing and provide insights for news organizations.
Author: Jessica R. Collier, University of Texas, Austin
Co-Authors: Johanna Dunaway, Texas A&M University and Natalie Jomini Stroud, University of Texas, Austin
What’s in a label? The effect of news labels on perceived content credibility
11:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 328
Two online experiments sought to understand whether labels on news stories operate as cognitive heuristics that attract reader attention and lead to increases in perceptions of the credibility of news content. Overall, both studies (Study 1: n = 1,006; Study 2: n = 721) showed that labels garner little attention from newsreaders and have no influence on perceptions of news story credibility. However, Study 2 demonstrated that an in-story explainer label-one that explained the type of news story-produced better recall of labels and made it more likely people would correctly recommend what the label should be. Findings suggest that if labels act as cognitive heuristics, they are weak ones. Furthermore, the confidence some news organizations are placing in labeling news stories to improve media trust may be misplaced.
Author: Cynthia Peacock, University of Alabama
Co-Authors: Gina Masullo Chen, University of Texas, Austin and Natalie Jomini Stroud, University of Texas, Austin
Sunday, November 17
When Trust in Media Matters: The Moderating Effects of Media Trust in Public Responsiveness
11:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 333
Does trust in media matter in responding to public policy change when the public perceives mediated information about the policy? Scholars have investigated the underlying mechanisms of how individuals actually engage with policy change with regard to mass media; however, a decline of public trust in mainstream media has been observed. This study examines the direct effects of media trust on defense spending preferences and its moderating effects between the media cues and the public’s preferences for the policy. To test those effects, the thermostatic model of policy feedback is applied to the analysis, relying on data from the 1980-2014 GSS and cumulative policy signals from major newspapers. Results indicate that the public’s thermostatic feedback of policy is moderated by media trust, which provides evidence that media coverage really matters, and that trust in media matters when the public receive the fact-based cues directly referring to changes in policy spending.
Author: Yujin Kim, University of Texas, Austin
William James, Pragmatic Resilience, and the Rhetoric of Stoicism
8:00 AM – 9:15 AM, Baltimore Convention Center, Room 347
William James was both a hardy soul and one that was often wounded by the world’s slings and arrows. In his turbulent youth, he was often comforted by a slow, daily reading from the “Meditations” penned by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and stoic. He recommended this to his close friends as a cure for their depression and despondency. His faith in and love for stoicism never left him; in his later years, he still gave send copies of this short book as gift for those struggling to survive life’s challenges. How did stoicism-and its rhetorical techniques-inflect his philosophical work, a body of work that is so important to the continued importance of American thought? This paper will explore the effect of James’ debt to stoicism on the ideas of individualism in his work, with particular attention to the rhetoric of individual resilience that becomes apparent across his evolving body of work. James’ moral philosophy will be shown to be distinctly rhetorical affair, one that engages his listeners and his readers on principles unique to the stoic philosophers he admired. We will conclude by continuing how James’ rhetoric of resilience in the face of the moral struggles of the world prefigures contemporary adaptions of stoic rhetoric in a variety of popular movements on social media. Thus, James’ rhetoric becomes a distinct entry in the historical evolution of pragmatist thought as well as part of the story of the continually adapting presence of stoic rhetoric in the American tradition.
Author: Scott Stroud, University of Texas, Austin
Co-Author: Clayton L. Terry, University of Texas, Austin