Expressive News Preferences: Identity-Signaling in News Selection

In polarized media environments, individuals’ news preferences may reflect identity signalingrather than genuine informational needs. This study introduces the concept of expressive newspreferences—news selections shaped by political identity when consumption is not expected. Apreregistered web-based experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 1,280)tested how consumption expectation and selection publicity influence attitude-consistent newschoices. Participants selected gun control headlines under one of four conditions varying bywhether they expected to read the full articles, and whether their selections were imagined to bepublic or private. Participants selected significantly more attitude-consistent news when they didnot expect to consume the content. This expressive bias was not significantly moderated byselection publicity, but moderate partisans exhibited greater bias than other groups. Thesefindings highlight identity-signaling tendencies in low-cost selection contexts and caution againstinterpreting selection-based preference measures as direct reflections of real-world newsconsumption.