Page 223 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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psychological approach, information does not move directly from the
political environment into the mind of the political individual without
undergoing transformations, irrationally biased selection, affective load-
ing,andothertransformativepsychologicaleffects.Theseeffects,broadly
speaking, demolish the thesis that people seek political information in
order to reduce uncertainty before acting.
The psychological approach can be summarized in three basic tenets.
The first is that as information costs fall and information sources multi-
ply, the information-rich get richer, and the information-poor stay poor. 22
This tenet is analogous to a law of increasing marginal returns, because it
suggests that the most energetic acquirers of new information are likely
to be those already best informed. It has been supported in one form
or another in a wide array of studies. Research on public opinion and
political behavior show that those with more education and higher levels
of political sophistication are more likely to assimilate new information
23
than those with less education and less sophistication. From the anal-
ysis of political cognition comes a similar result. Schema theory and
research shows that well-informed and knowledgeable people learn and
recall more from new information, while less well-informed people learn
and recall less. 24 More readily accessible information therefore tends to
widen knowledge gaps rather than diminish them. “Uses and gratifi-
cations” research in the field of media studies shows that citizens seek
out one medium over another because it provides a particular form of
gratification, not simply because it better informs them in an objective
25
sense. Past research has shown that newspapers prove more gratifying

22
JamesH.Kuklinski,RobertC.Luskin,andJohnBolland,“WhereIstheSchema?Going
Beyond the ‘S’ Word in Political Psychology,” American Political Science Review 85,
no. 4 (1991): 1341–1356.
23 Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock, Reasoning and Choice; Douglas M. McLeod and
Elizabeth M. Perse, “Direct and Indirect Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Pub-
lic Affairs Knowledge,” Journalism Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1994): 433–442. One excep-
tion is the proposition from social learning theory that less interested (and therefore
less informed) citizens are more likely to be affected by the interaction between new
information and social context because they are more likely to discover that their
preferences or opinions are discordant with their social environments. See Robert
Huckfeldt and John Sprague, Citizens, Politicism and Social Communication: Informa-
tion and Influence in an Election Campaign (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
24
In Downsian terms, this effect might be explained if the total costs of information
are dominated not by the cost of acquiring it but by the cost of assimilating and
evaluating it.
25
Steven H. Chaffee and Stacey Frank Kanihan, “Learning about Politics from the Mass
Media,” Political Communication 14, no. 4 (1997): 421–430; W. Russell Neuman,
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