ABSTRACT
Today’s high-choice digital environment makes it easier than ever to recede into a comfortable bubble of like-minded thinking or to tune out entirely from news media. Evolutionary psychology can help us understand our desire to reduce the “unpleasant sensations” that accompany challenging information, and learning about various kinds of cognitive bias can help explain our reactions to overwhelming choice. Social and political psychology are central to critical news literacy because understanding our own motivations and desires helps us understand how we operate in the news landscape. This chapter covers the rise of technologies of addiction and the attention economy and the basic psychological tendencies that the internet and digital technologies exploit. Blurring lines between producer and consumer also make it important to consider how the limitations of human cognition affect our agency in managing our news consumption. Recent research in political and moral psychology can help us understand how we perceive and respond to social reality, including theories of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, selective exposure, and the backfire effect.
