When response is news: individual reactions to news websites that solicit reader opinion as moderated by need for closure

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This study of undergraduate and graduate students (N=61) examined individual reactions to news websites that solicit immediate reader opinion as moderated by the need for closure (NFC). The experiment tested whether websites that ask readers to form an opinion about the story they are reading affected readers' desire for more information, whether readers found such sites to be favorable, how opinion solicitations affected the number of thoughts readers had about the news story itself, and how opinion solicitations affected the number of argumentative thoughts readers had while reading these websites. In the presence of opinion solicitations, individuals with a high dispositional need for closure had significantly fewer thoughts about the news they were reading.