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Counteracting the Biasing Effects of Unrepresentative News Exemplification on
Issue Perception: Implications of the Base-rate Fallacy Research from Psychology
Abstract
This conceptual paper examines the literature of news exemplification effects and
points out the problematic theoretical accounts on the dominant effects of news
exemplification in communication research. The use of heuristics is inherently
conflicting with the elaborated processes of generating estimates of issue positions
from the aggregation of exemplars. The psychological literature in the base-rate
fallacy is reviewed to provide new insight into the clarification of the theoretical
contradiction. Such a clarification has both theoretical and practical significance to the
literature of news exemplification effects, particularly in generating more constructive
defense mechanisms against the dominant, biasing effects of unrepresentative news
exemplification. Comparability of the psychological and communication paradigms is
established and suggestions for future empirical study are made.
Key words:
News exemplification
Base-rate fallacy
Information processing
Issue perception