The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News
研究了新闻被消费者反复复述时，事实如何逐渐被带有负面倾向的意见和解释取代，揭示了复述者自认比接收者更懂时会主动提供引导性解读。
This work advances and tests a theory of how news information evolves as it is successively retold by consumers. Drawing on data from over 11,000 participants across ten experiments, the authors offer evidence that when news is repeatedly retold, it undergoes a stylistic transformation termed “disagreeable personalization,” wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations with a slant toward negativity. The central thesis is that when retellers believe they are more (vs. less) knowledgeable than their recipient about the information they are relaying, they feel more compelled to provide guidance on its meaning and to do so in a persuasive manner. This enhanced motivation to guide persuasively, in turn, leads retellers to not only select the subset of facts they deem most essential but, critically, to provide their interpretations and opinions on those facts, with negativity being used as a means of grabbing their audience’s attention. Implications of this work for research on retelling and consumer information diffusion are explored.