EP 09 Selective Exposure and Motivated Reasoning with Josh Pasek

In this episode, Julius, Sage, and Hanna talk to University of Michigan professor of Communication and Media and Political Science Josh Pasek about how people process political information in today’s digital public sphere. The conversation breaks down selective exposure and motivated reasoning, why we seek confirming news, reject dissonant facts, and rely on mental shortcuts shaped by our social circles, prior beliefs, and media algorithms. Josh explains how fragmented online information environments and viral extreme content fuel polarization, erode trust, and make democratic deliberation and compromise harder, even when most people aren’t acting maliciously. The episode also explores the need for civic effort, better context in news coverage, and potential system-level fixes—from platform incentives to public media—plus practical habits for intentional media consumption, including adding “friction” to screens and curating a healthier media diet.

Key Takeaways from Josh:

1. Democratic citizenship is not supposed to be easy. Being a citizen in a democracy requires a significant amount of individual effort and hard work to stay informed. Care about the polity as a whole, and look beyond your own narrow group interest.
2. Writing off those who disagree with you as "bad actors" is highly dangerous. Falling into the trap of assuming anyone with an opposing viewpoint is malicious is damaging. It fragments communities and undermines society as a whole.
3. No one else is going to do the work for you. You cannot wait for media platforms or a system-level fix to solve the current information crisis. Individuals have to take personal responsibility, practice intentionality, and put in the legwork to better engage with the information in front of them.

Find out more about Josh on:

• Josh’s website
• His LinkedIn, and Bluesky

Josh’s Media Diet

Meat and potatoes: 

Outlets: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Wired, ProPublica, The Guardian, Bluesky 

Junk Food: Josh is a news junkie, the news is his junk food.

Palate cleanser: 

• Improv classes and curating quality content for his kids: Monty Python, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

Transcript

In this episode, Julius, Sage, and Hanna talk to University of Michigan professor of Communication and Media and Political Science Josh Pasek about how people process political information in today’s digital public sphere. The conversation breaks down selective exposure and motivated reasoning, why we seek confirming news, reject dissonant facts, and rely on mental shortcuts shaped by our social circles, prior beliefs, and media algorithms. Josh explains how fragmented online information environments and viral extreme content fuel polarization, erode trust, and make democratic deliberation and compromise harder, even when most people aren’t acting maliciously. The episode also explores the need for civic effort, better context in news coverage, and potential system-level fixes—from platform incentives to public media—plus practical habits for intentional media consumption, including adding “friction” to screens and curating a healthier media diet.

Key Takeaways from Josh:

1. Democratic citizenship is not supposed to be easy. Being a citizen in a democracy requires a significant amount of individual effort and hard work to stay informed. Care about the polity as a whole, and look beyond your own narrow group interest.
2. Writing off those who disagree with you as "bad actors" is highly dangerous. Falling into the trap of assuming anyone with an opposing viewpoint is malicious is damaging. It fragments communities and undermines society as a whole.
3. No one else is going to do the work for you. You cannot wait for media platforms or a system-level fix to solve the current information crisis. Individuals have to take personal responsibility, practice intentionality, and put in the legwork to better engage with the information in front of them.

Find out more about Josh on:

• Josh’s website
• His LinkedIn, and Bluesky

Josh’s Media Diet

Meat and potatoes: 

Outlets: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Wired, ProPublica, The Guardian, Bluesky 

Junk Food: Josh is a news junkie, the news is his junk food.

Palate cleanser: 

• Improv classes and curating quality content for his kids: Monty Python, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Transcript:

Josh Pasek (00:00:00): 

Democratic citizenship isn't easy. It's not even supposed to be easy. You are supposed to, as a citizen, put in a bunch of work to be informed, to figure out what it is that we should be striving for as a society, and to think of the polity as a whole and not just your narrow group.

Julius Freeman (00:00:28): 

Welcome to another episode of Captivated, a podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere, how it works and how we got here. We're here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Julius.

Hanna Sistek (00:00:48): 

I'm Hanna.

Sage Goodwin (00:00:49): 

And I'm Sage. We've had some great conversations recently on the podcast about the problems of misinformation and disinformation. We dug into that in our last episode with Sri Srinivasan, and we're also thinking about those same kinds of issues in our episode on digital blackface with Ryan Ken. In both conversations, we focused on improving our ability to identify these things and strengthening our media literacy.

Hanna Sistek (00:01:10): 

As a political communication scholar, I'm also thinking about this from a slightly different perspective. As well as being able to detect falsehoods, we also need to understand how people consume information and come to believe what they do, and Josh Pasek was the perfect person to explain all this. He's a professor of communication and media and a political science research professor at the University of Michigan, where he is also the associate director of the Michigan Institute for Data Science.

Sage Goodwin (00:01:34): 

Josh's research explores how new media and psychological processes each shape political attitudes, political behaviors, and public opinion. He's the author of two books about American elections, Words That Matter and Democracy Amid Crises.

Julius Freeman (00:01:48): 

We spoke to Josh about selective exposure and motivated reasoning. Selective exposure is the tendency to seek out information that confirms what one already believes. Motivated reasoning is the processing of information based on our preexisting worldview. He did a great job of thoroughly explaining these two different concepts, which we have touched upon in previous episodes, but not to this depth.

Hanna Sistek (00:02:12): 

I also thought it was interesting when Josh pointed out the two possible reasons behind motivated reasoning: one being goal orientation, as in someone wanting to believe something, and the other being the simple impact of one's social environment. So if you hang out with people on the political right, then most likely you encounter information aligning with the conservative worldview without necessarily making an effort to seek it out. It just comes with the territory, and vice versa happens on the political left. It was also a good point that the mental shortcuts we take through selective exposure and motivated reasoning are actually necessary for us to function well as a society, even though they may come with some drawbacks, because no one has the time to be fully informed on all matters.

Sage Goodwin (00:02:52): 

I learned a lot in this conversation, but one of the things that really stuck with me was actually when we were talking to Josh about his media diet. He spoke about trying to introduce friction into watching things at home with his kids. So rather than just mindlessly turning on the TV, he has a projector that requires effort to set up. He's trying to make sure there's intention behind his media consumption.

Julius Freeman (00:03:12): 

We started the conversation by asking Josh how he started studying media psychology.

Sage Goodwin (00:03:18): 

Okay. So, Josh, we'd love to know what led you to the work that you do.

Josh Pasek (00:03:22): 

I have a couple of answers to that, but I think I took the "lean in" version of undecided at every choice point in life. When I first got to college, I was like, "I could do anything." I kind of wanted to do a natural science, I wanted to do a social science, I was everywhere. Then I discovered that I could take way more interesting courses without having to take prerequisites in political science, so that's what I did. And when I got to grad school, the ability to study public opinion was a place where I didn't actually need to commit to studying one thing. I got to study what people think about everything. It was so much more fun because, yes, I have this area that's mine, which is how people think about things, but I get to dig into all these other topics and enjoy my Wikipedia rabbit holes and the like as I figure out, "Okay, how do I make sense of and ask reasonable questions about the Affordable Care Act?" Or, "How do I do that about what people think about AI?" or stuff like that.

Hanna Sistek (00:04:16): 

I want to maybe take just a slight step back. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal life and who you are, so we can introduce you that way to the listeners as well?

Josh Pasek (00:04:28): 

Yes. So I am Josh Pasek. I am a professor of communication and media, and political science at the University of Michigan. I also do a lot of data science work. I study public opinion, so I try to figure out how people get and use political information to make decisions. I am trying to figure out how we measure what people think about things in American society. So that's kind of my drift.

Hanna Sistek (00:04:51): 

Cool. So you basically work on how people process information and how bias plays into that. Can you unpack some of the core concepts around this for our listeners?

Josh Pasek (00:05:02): 

When you go and you learn about things in society, how do you learn about them? Where do you learn about them from, and what do you think about the things you hear? If you think about the information you get on any topic, where you get it from is going to influence what you make of that information. How that relates to all the other information you have is going to change what perspective you have on it, whether it fits with other things or if it doesn't fit with other things. I've always been really interested in those kinds of questions, and how that contextual information, whether it's everything from race, to the news sources that you get something from, to the way that you think about different issues and how this relates to it, can shape what it is that you tend to believe, what it is that you tend not to believe, and by extension, what attitudes you end up having about things and what you like and dislike.

Hanna Sistek (00:05:59): 

Right. And so, can you talk us through the information filtering process that you are studying that sort of leads to biased information?

Josh Pasek (00:06:09): 

Yeah, so we've thought for a long time that when people go out and look for information, they might be trying to find information that agrees with them. There's probably an extent to which that happens. There has been a whole bunch of research on the idea of motivated reasoning and on this notion of selective exposure, people going and looking for information and believing information that fits with what they already believe.

Hanna Sistek (00:06:34): 

And can you just briefly unpack those two concepts for our listeners?

Josh Pasek (00:06:38): 

Yeah, so selective exposure is the idea that you go out and you try to find information that is going to support the views you already have. You look for information in the places that you think are likely to do that. The idea behind motivated reasoning is that when you learn something, you decide whether you buy it or don't buy it based on some combination of whether that fits your preexisting views and whether that matches with other information you have, et cetera. A lot of the underlying notion here really comes from the psychological theories of cognitive dissonance and the notion that if you hear something that feels like it doesn't really fit with other things, you might find reasons to reject it.

Hanna Sistek (00:07:21): 

Got it. And so, in the seminar that we just listened to with you, some of the filtering processes you talked about were selective exposure, social filtering, and also algorithms. Can you talk a little more about the digital public sphere and how that plays into the filtering process?

Josh Pasek (00:07:41): 

Yeah. So when you think about how you're getting information, the information that you see is not everything that you could encounter. There's just too much out there nowadays. There was this notion back 30 or 40 years ago that The New York Times had sort of "all the news that's fit to print," and it's really obvious if you think about it today that nobody could cover all the news that is reasonable to cover on a particular day. And so that leads to this question of, okay, well, what actually gets through to you, and under what circumstances?

To figure that out, each of us in practice has a number of filters that lead some stuff to have a chance of reaching us and some not to. Some things never get written up by a journalist, so they're definitely not going to reach you. Some things don't get a prominent place in whatever news outlet you happen to go to, so those aren't going to reach you. There are some things that your friends won't share, so those aren't going to reach you. Those kinds of processes take this massive amount of information that could be politically relevant in some way, shape, or form, and winnow it down to what you're actually going to encounter in your everyday life. That's the stuff you build your views from. You can't really build your views from the stuff that you don't know about.

Julius Freeman (00:09:03): 

I have a question because this selective exposure and this filtering have always been really interesting to me. Do you find this kind of social filtering to be a problem, or do you think it's just a function of the human brain?

Josh Pasek (00:09:20): 

I mean, there's no way that we could reasonably live in a democratic society and encounter all the information that could be relevant to whatever we need to decide on, and use that, think about it deeply enough, have deliberation with other people so that we've talked it over and come to understand other perspectives, make decisions on it, and actually live. It's an impossibility. You can't really imagine an arrangement or a society where people could go out and do that, spend all that time, and still have a productive society. So you have to find some way not to deal with everything. You don't have a choice.

None of us can learn everything that could be relevant to the kinds of decisions that would make sense in the public sphere. If we tried to do all that, that would take up all our time. So on some level, we have to figure out a way to shortcut our way around it. Then the question functionally becomes: are our shortcuts ones that kind of approximate what we would learn, what we would be thinking, and how we would view things if we really had all the information? Or are the shortcuts we end up using biased because the set of information we're working with and the procedures that we're using are leading us down another path that we wouldn't go down if we actually had that imaginary time to do everything?

Julius Freeman (00:10:53): 

And so with that, in your research, you talk about how there are these sources of bias, and you start to talk about goal orientation and social location. As we're moving down this path, can you help us understand how that functions in this filtering process?

Josh Pasek (00:11:07): 

Yeah, so I really think of two ways that people can come to biased conclusions. One of those ways is because they want to. We tend to think a lot of the time that if somebody's coming to a conclusion that disagrees with us, that's because they wanted to get there and they must sort of have that as an intent. But it's also possible that a lot of people, a lot of the time, encounter information that just fits better with the other kinds of things that put them where they are.

So if you happen to live in a community where most of your friends share things that are on the political right, you're more likely to encounter those things on the political right, to probably believe some of those things on the political right, and to make conclusions that are on the political right yourself. And vice versa, if you are on the political left, the same is more likely there. So if that's the environment you're in, you could do it because you're trying to reach a particular conclusion—that's the goal orientation—or you could do it just because socially that's who you're around, and that's what you encounter or what seems a little more credible to you once you do encounter it.

Julius Freeman (00:12:22): 

Goal orientation is something that you're explicitly after, whereas a social location is more about the circle that you're in and being more likely to try to align with that.

Josh Pasek (00:12:30): 

Yeah, and my point is that it doesn't need to be on purpose. It's easy to think that when people come to views that seem antithetical to your own, they have some kind of bad motivation—that they want to do something negative toward your group or that it's malicious in some way, shape, or form. I don't buy that. I don't think most people are trying to be malicious in the way they encounter information and make decisions; I think they come to different conclusions because those conclusions seem more reasonable to them a lot of the time.

If you think through it, the question then becomes: how is it that we end up with such a polarized society if that's the case? How is it that we all seem to disagree with each other so much, even when we are sometimes watching the same information? I observed this in one of the cases relevant to this when looking at the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting. There was a bunch of information showing that Black and white Americans were coming to different conclusions about the actual matters of what had happened there. They reached different conclusions about whether he had a weapon and whether the officer was behaving appropriately or not. The question then became: were they making those different conclusions because they were trying to, or were they making them because those conclusions just seemed more reasonable to Black Americans versus white Americans?

I think where I ended up in looking through the evidence suggests it's the latter. It's not that white Americans necessarily wanted to conclude that the officer was right, or that Black Americans wanted to conclude that he was behaving inappropriately. Rather, in practice, those conclusions simply seemed more credible to different groups of people. Why was that? Why did it seem more credible to them? It seemed more credible because each of us has a life experience, and the kinds of things in our life experiences shape how likely different things seem. If you've lived your life entirely having great interactions with police officers, you've never seen a case where they've done anything inappropriate, and your community is not over-policed, then your general inclination is to think that police officers behave pretty well, just like they do in your community. If you, on the other hand, come from a community that is over-policed, where police officers do seem to be pulling over Black Americans more than they do white Americans, and you see that in your day-to-day life, then it's more credible to believe that maybe something happened here that was unequal in a way that really isn't how it was supposed to go down. Those two narratives compete with each other in practice, in part because their believability is different to different people.

Sage Goodwin (00:15:27): 

I like this term "priors." I don't know if it's a political science term, a psychology term, or a comms department term, but I can tell you it is definitely not a history term. That's what you call that, right?

Josh Pasek (00:15:38): 

This is actually a statistical term, so it's none of the above. It's interdisciplinary, exactly.

Hanna Sistek (00:15:45): 

I know, I know.

Josh Pasek (00:15:46): 

I don't believe in disciplines. In statistics, there are sort of two kinds of statistics that have weird battles, but one of those is known as frequentist statistics, and the other is known as Bayesian statistics. Frequentist statistics is the traditional way we've done a lot of things. However, there has long been a realization that if you want to think about what you really know about things, you should actually do something a little bit different from just running an experiment and seeing whether it was less than five percent likely to happen given the null hypothesis, which is the traditional statistical approach.

Instead, what you start with in terms of your beliefs and understandings of the world is part of the narrative. If you go through and think about everyday life, how do you learn about things? You don't say, "Okay, I'm gathering new evidence. I'm going to forget everything I knew and only believe the new stuff." Instead, what you do is say, "Okay, what did I think before? What did I learn now? And what do I think now that I've encountered that new information?"

Bayesian statistics, and also this more casual notion of Bayesianism, is the idea that you start with those beliefs, and those beliefs actually should filter into what you think now because what you knew before doesn't become irrelevant just because you're collecting new data. Those things are called priors; they are your prior beliefs. But we shorten it to "priors" just to confuse anybody who doesn't study Bayesian statistics. You update that with an equally mediocre term, your "likelihood," which is the new thing you've learned, to come out with what's called your "posterior belief," or what you now think after combining those two.

Hanna Sistek (00:17:32): 

Yeah. So I'm wondering a little bit. So, I heard you say that basically the two ways that people get biased are, you know, where you get your information from and also how that stuff fits into what you already know, which is the priors. Right? So, can you explain to the listeners why this distinction is important?

Josh Pasek (00:17:52): 

I'm going to adjust it a little bit, right? I think in practice, when we think about how people get news information, there are sort of three pieces of that puzzle. First, you go out, and you encounter some information. Where are you encountering it? The second piece is making sense of the information you've now encountered, how do you put it in your brain? You hear something; do you believe it or not believe it? Do you think it came from a source that makes sense to you? That kind of stuff. And then finally, later at some point, you get asked to, say, pick a political candidate based on that information. That eventual choice point is when you are expressing your beliefs.

So on that level, there are these sorts of different parts of a process where some amount of bias could enter. You could encounter a set of information that doesn't really match what would be ideal if you knew everything. If you encounter only information that supports a particular viewpoint, how are you going to possibly come to a different viewpoint? Even if you were able to magically get all the information in the world, would you reach that other viewpoint? And then, when you make sense of that information, too, deciding what it is that matters and how important it is is another step where you can end up biasing the process. What you have put together as things that are worth believing and important things may differ depending on whether those new things you learn seem credible or not so credible.

In one study that we did, we were giving people information about polling data. We told them either that the candidate they preferred was ahead by a tiny bit or that the candidate they didn't prefer was ahead by a tiny bit. These were not big distinctions. They were real, independent polls at the time, but when people heard that the candidate they preferred was ahead, they said, "Oh, you know, I'm guessing that's a higher-quality poll." So they weren't necessarily disbelieving that the poll was done and that that was the information; they just thought the better poll, when they encountered two, tended to be the one that already fit with what they expected and believed. Why is that? Well, I think at least in part it's because they thought it was just more credible because it fit with other things, and whether something matches other evidence is actually a reasonable credibility judgment.

Sage Goodwin (00:20:25): 

In thinking about all of this and the ways people process information, we're going to put you on the spot a little bit because we like to ask what's wrong with our digital public sphere. To you, given all of this research that you've done, does it seem like there is a particular problem that we're facing right now?

Josh Pasek (00:20:44): 

Well, I think if you take the information environment that we're in right now, we are in an environment where, at best, we're going to get a relatively small portion of the information that might be relevant. Unlike in the past—for good and bad—we no longer all get the same little bit of that information. You go back to like the 1960s and 1970s, and three news channels were presenting basically the same news on television. When they were presenting that news, they presented it in a way that sort of said, "Okay, this is the stuff you need to consider." Americans looked at that news pretty frequently, and even if they didn't watch it themselves, they heard it from others. The information they were working off of to make judgments was basically consistent. You could come to different judgments from that information, but you weren't working from completely distinct information environments where you were likely not to see the same thing at all. So that's one big piece of it: right now, we are in an overall information environment where we can't reasonably be expected to encounter the same things.

Sage Goodwin (00:21:53):

Yeah. So, from a monoculture to a totally fragmented environment. Information silos.

Josh Pasek (00:21:57): 

It doesn't even mean that we only encounter stuff that agrees with us, right? That's often how we talk about it, as if everybody is in a filter bubble and the only things they're going to encounter are going to agree with them. The data doesn't actually support that. But I don't think it needs to support that to be a disaster in a variety of respects. For one, if we can't agree on what to work off of, that does make things harder in the first place. But another issue is that if you look at what is spreading in the online digital sphere, the stuff that spreads the most is the most extreme, it's the stuff that's really on the edges.

This leads to what I think of, if I can reasonably say it on this podcast, as the "batshit crazy" problem of thinking about political information. When you encounter information that is extreme on your side, you think about it a little bit, and you're like, "Well, I wouldn't go that way. They're being kind of hyperbolic, but I can understand where they're coming from." But when you see the extreme stuff on the other side, you're like, "Oh my God, those people are nuts." That is a really bad situation to end up in. If we've got somewhat different bases of information and you start thinking those other people are just bonkers, how on earth are you going to come to a place where you can reasonably do the democratic processes of trying to negotiate and deliberate this stuff out to come to good policy? Even worse, you'll look at your representatives and, if they're trying to do that in good faith, you'll be like, "What are you doing? Don't talk to those people." That creates a really negative environment, one that undermines trust writ large and can have pernicious effects on how we think about the other people we're supposed to be working with to have an effective society.

Julius Freeman (00:23:41): 

So I guess then the question I'm having in my mind is, how do we do that? What if the ideas genuinely are crazy? How do you actually engage in that process?

Josh Pasek (00:23:56): 

Not everybody holds the crazy ideas, and I think that's the bit we need to start with. The people at the true extremes. Yeah, you're not going to get a committed fascist and a committed socialist doing Kumbaya. It's not going to happen. But there are a lot of things across the political spectrum that we could probably agree on if we actually asked, "What are your values? What do you care about?" If we could agree on what the information space is, we could come to ways of saying, "Okay, this is stuff we can all work with," or "Oh, this is really important to you, and that other thing is really important to you."

There's this process that used to exist called "logrolling," where you sort of agree to give up a little bit to get more of what you care about. We don't do that stuff anymore because everything is a political battle instead of being aimed at having a better-functioning society.

Julius Freeman (00:24:50):

So thinking about this then, it sounds like, and you tell me if I'm wrong on anything, you have this problem of: we need to have democratic communication to get to better solutions for our society. But one of the reasons that that isn't happening is that we have this filtering that's happening online, and in terms of the information that we're consuming. And people are starting to get that filtering also in the sense that they're only receiving the most extreme views of the people who are on the other side of them. And through that, not only do we have this, you know, heavenly perspective of ourselves, but also this. An evil perspective of the other side, and then trying to make democratic decisions based on that.

Josh Pasek (00:25:32):

Yeah. I mean, how could you possibly work with somebody you think is malicious? Yes. 

Sage Goodwin (00:25:37): 

Tendency to just write people off based on. 

Josh Pasek (00:25:39):

If you think they're evil, you can't work with them there. There's no starting point. It would actually be immoral. You just need to fight against them if they are evil, and it would be immoral to work with them if they're bad. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so if that's the perspective we end up getting of the people who disagree with us that they're evil, they really can't be worked with, then politics is a death sport, and we enter the death spiral, I think we're in right now. But if the perspective is, "Okay, these people are coming from a really different place, and there might be some common ground, but we need to do the work to find it," historically in American politics, like, we could do that. We were able to do it for decades. That doesn't mean that we've never come to points kind of like this, right? Obviously, we went through the Civil War, but, you know, most of the time we've found ways of trying to negotiate that and saying, you know, there is something bigger about all of this. America as an idea, the notions of what a free society can look like, are bigger, even if we disagree on some kind of fundamental things, because there are points that we can come together on on that.

Julius Freeman (00:26:48):

And so then that kind of leads us to the question. You talked about that there was work that's been done in the past, and there's work that we can do. Based on your understanding of the current media system and your work, what do you think we can do or should be doing? 

Josh Pasek (00:27:02):

That's a harder question. 

Julius Freeman (00:27:04):

But, yeah. 

Josh Pasek (00:27:05):

I think, in practice, we need to not write everybody else off, right? Disagreement does not mean antithetical. And I think we need to sort of try, wherever we can, to rewind and say, "Okay, look, ask the questions. What is it that other people really do believe? What do they value?" And that doesn't mean everybody's going to value and believe something reasonable, like, some people will not, right? Some people hold deeply, you know, interlinked conspiracist ideas about groups. And that's a real problem, right? Like, you aren't going to be able to discuss certain things with them in ways that are going to make sense. But by and large, is that what most people really want out of their politics? I doubt it. And so I think, you know, just a starting point. I know it seems small and borderline insignificant, is like going in without the sense that this is a death match. Going in without the sense that this is, you know, one wins, one loses, and saying like, "Actually, a good society builds on all of this, and we've got to figure out where that ideal point is that best balances what all of us want, and what we would all think if we really had perfect information and the ability to know what other people were thinking."

Julius Freeman (00:28:26):

And so in terms of those solutions.

Josh Pasek (00:28:29):

Specific skills or habits that we should be practicing? I think it's important to try to make sure that you do know what's going on, that you try to do a little bit of legwork to understand the context of things. One thing that really bums me about, you know, even the best news that's out there right now is that it rarely offers very good context on what we should know to be able to talk about these things in the first place, right? Just before we did this podcast, right, we went to war with Iran. So, okay, what do you need to know to be able to make sense of a war with Iran? My undergrads have no idea what you need to know to make sense of a war with Iran. You've got to at least have a good sense going back to the 1970s, probably back to the 1950s. You need to understand sort of how Iran has been operating as a global player, where they fit in different geopolitical alliances. And if that's not context, you have good luck, right? So that sort of stuff is getting really hard to do. And it means that I think we've got to figure out some ways of letting people get that broader context, which I don't actually think we have good systems for right now. So I know that's like a non-answer.

Julius Freeman (00:29:48):

No, but that's what I think we need. I think we're getting to a great place. I think there are a lot of things that the individual can do. And so our question, what we're kind of thinking about as well, is at the system level. You know, thinking about social media platforms, thinking about our government, do you have any ideas on, like, the policy level, the platform level that we could do? 

Josh Pasek (00:30:09):

I mean, we'd all love it if platforms stopped just trying to maximize engagement and started trying to think of themselves as actors in a democratic system. We used to have a media environment writ large where the goal of the system was actually serving democracy, right? But at CBS, at one point, the owner of CBS was talking to the news team…

Sage Goodwin (00:30:35):

Bill Paley. 

Josh Pasek (00:30:35):

Yes, thank you, Bill Paley. And he was saying, "We have Jack Benny to make us money, and you guys don't need to be a moneymaking entity." And the idea that the news team could go do the right thing in supporting the news, and Jack Benny could make the company money, is a totally different ballgame from where we're at right now. And it's actually kind of crazy that we're not there because, you know, when Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, there's no reason that he can't say, "Okay, this could be a little bit of a loss leader, but it could be good for everybody." But that's not how these things are operating right now. And so, the current view of things is these media outlets are some combination of a moneymaking machine, which is not really the best way to create news, and whatever its ownership is sort of pushing it toward, which is its own funky question that I have less to say about, but clearly seems problematic here.

Sage Goodwin (00:31:34):

I'm just itching as a TV news historian. Go, go, go, go, go, jump in. No, I just feel it'd be remiss of me not to slightly caveat that because it's a slight sort of golden ageism about what TV news network…

Josh Pasek (00:31:49):

Television news was. Oh, doubtless, right? Like, it was all white editors who had very particular views of what the news was like. I don't want to discount any of the big problems of that era, right? We know they, like, totally missed what was going on in Vietnam for quite a while, right? The same basic thing happened during the Iraq war, right? So there were all sorts of structural problems. Yeah, and I don't want to pretend it's that level of utopia, right? No. So, very much yes.

Sage Goodwin (00:32:20):

No. Yeah, absolutely. All of that, but also specifically that idea that the TV news was this center of conscience for the rest of the organization, that it was completely protected from a profit-seeking motive. That was actually a very profitable TV news, like, right from the beginning, and that was a very convenient reputational move that was done very deliberately because of public interest regulations. But so, sorry, that's just me being like, "Well, actually." I'm with you, but… which is not to say that it's exactly like it is now. There definitely has been a shift. But just to kind of caveat, the like commercial imperative has always been there, and the reputational strategy of saying that it's a prestige operation that just operates differently from how it operates now. 

Josh Pasek (00:33:08):

For sure. Yeah. No, and the other thing that I think I'm going to add on there is like, when you get to that earlier era, you have a professional journalist class that is trained on those norms, even if that's not really the way that journalism works. And so the idea of individual journalists going out there and doing their jobs is far less connected to the profit motive than it is now. You look at once all the journalists jumped on Twitter, right? And they're being like, pushed to come up with things to do on Twitter to try to promote everything that's going on, because individual journalists, once we get to the social media era, are now expected to be part of how we get the news out there. It's a very different thing. So, yeah, I hear you. Like, yes, I am painting an overly rosy picture, but I think there is a big norm shift, and that norm shift is what I'm trying to highlight, even if slightly hyperbolically. 

Julius Freeman (00:34:02):

And so you kind of pointed out even that part of the issue with the current media platforms is that some of it is that the way that they're controlled doesn't really give them the ability to kind of step out of that box, and they might need help from the government or some type of regulations forced to do those things. Do you feel like regulation is the path? 

Josh Pasek (00:34:25):

I mean, I'm not entirely sure here, right? I think there is an extent to which some amount of regulation could potentially be quite helpful. But there are also real challenges, because when you have a single entity in some way, shape, or form regulating news, that can go very, very wrong. On some level, a UK-ish strategy of having a strong public media that does compete directly with the private media seems like it would be a big bonus in a place like the US. So I'd love to see something like that. But I don't know that I have a clear regulatory answer. And some of the regulations that have fallen off the wayside, while they seemed helpful in a bunch of ways, had a bunch of costs that I think are harder to think through.

Sage Goodwin (00:35:12):

Yeah. Everyone always points to something like the Fairness Doctrine as a bad thing that was deregulated away. But actually, if you look at how it operated, it's one of the things responsible for this "both sides-ing" and false equivalency. So, there are regulations we've lost where it's questionable how effective they actually were.

Josh Pasek (00:35:33):

Sadly, we still need to move away from that "both sides" norm, though. I mean, to the extent that you see it, everything becomes a Republican versus Democrat issue. But not everything in society fits that mold. Some things just don't. A hurricane isn't a Republican or a Democratic hurricane. It hits people, and as a society, we should help them if we believe that's mutually beneficial.

Hanna Sistek (00:36:00):

And cover the event itself.

Julius Freeman (00:36:02):

Yeah.

Hanna Sistek (00:36:02):

Yeah.

Julius Freeman (00:36:03):

Do you see anything on the research side that makes you feel hopeful we'll find some solutions moving forward?

Josh Pasek (00:36:11):

Where I do see hope on the research side is knowing that human psychology hasn't fundamentally changed. Historically, there have been periods where we were able to bridge divides in really meaningful ways and solve tough issues. All of that tells us it’s possible. When we look at how people make decisions and what filters into that process, people are still operating in basically the same way. There hasn't been some fundamental shift that magically undermined everything.

Does our current media environment make it tougher? Absolutely. But if you look back historically, the era I might be painting with a slightly overly rosy brush—the 1960s—is a useful comparison point for where we are now, but it wasn't what was going on in the 1920s or the 1850s. Things were very different at various points in time.

The other hopeful sign is that while we have this highly disruptive new way of getting information, it's not the first time we've experienced this. You can go all the way back to the printing press to find strong historical parallels of what disruptive technologies do to communication and political action. The fact is, over time, we've found ways to build social norms that respond to those disruptions. The challenge is that we are in that flux period right now. Social media emerged, ordinary individuals became capable of broadcasting to one another, and now AI is jumping into the mix. This is deeply disruptive to our traditional ways of working. Can we solve the problem? I feel like we can. We just haven't come up with the solution yet.

Hanna Sistek (00:38:20):

Josh, reflecting on our entire conversation, what are maybe three key takeaways you would want our listeners to walk away with?

Josh Pasek (00:38:32):

I'd start by saying that democratic citizenship isn't easy. It's not even supposed to be easy. As a citizen, you are supposed to put in the work to stay informed, figure out what we should be striving for as a society, and think of the polity as a whole rather than just your narrow group. We are capable of doing that, but the tendency to assume everyone who disagrees with us is a bad actor is incredibly dangerous. It can undermine and fragment not just specific communities, but society as a whole. The takeaway there is that we all have to take some responsibility. It would be a massive loss if we didn't put in that effort.

Sage Goodwin (00:39:24):

Okay, so do the work. Exactly. Sorry, you don't get off free! Any other takeaways apart from that?

Josh Pasek (00:39:33):

To expand on that: nobody else is going to do it for you. They won't. You have to put in the effort. But in practice, we are entirely capable of better engaging with the information in front of us and finding new ways to do it well.

Sage Goodwin (00:39:51):

Thinking about the information in front of us, we want to know about the information in front of you. We usually like to ask our guests about their media diet, framing it as: "What's your meat and potatoes? What's your junk food? What's your palate cleanser?"

Josh Pasek (00:40:08):

I'm pretty lame when it comes to media, but I like to think it's in a semi-principled way. I am almost exclusively a news reader. I rarely engage with audio or visual content unless it's directly relevant to a story. Frankly, I might push for others to do the same. When you engage with news via video, or when you're absorbing the social cues of your friends alongside it, it introduces emotional effects that alter how you make sense of the information. It stops being just about the data, and stops you from simply asking, "What do I make of this?"

I try to stick strictly to reading the news. I always turn to The New York Times because of its unique, critical role in American politics. Their failure to report something is often a major piece of news in itself. I also read The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. Recently, I've been pretty impressed with Wired's reporting. ProPublica and The Guardian are others that I think do a fantastic job. Beyond that, I maintain a carefully curated BlueSky feed made up of academics and journalists. I find that really helpful because it surfaces things I might miss elsewhere. I'm incredibly selective about who I follow, and BlueSky forces you to be deliberate since it doesn't rely on an algorithm—it just feeds you based on your direct choices.

Sage Goodwin (00:41:39):

Interesting. Do you have a specific time of day for catching up on the news, or what does your general approach look like?

Josh Pasek (00:41:46):

I read way too much news, honestly. It's my default behavior whenever I'm not doing something else, which isn't particularly healthy—though I try to make it useful. I actually unpack the news with my students partly to justify a terrible over-consumption habit and turn it into a positive. It's all a ploy, really.

Sage Goodwin (00:42:09):

Yeah, exactly.

Hanna Sistek (00:42:11):

And it's certainly better than the doomscrolling you see on social media.

Sage Goodwin (00:42:15):

Are you subscribing to print versions of any of these, or is it entirely digital?

Josh Pasek (00:42:20):

I get the print version of The Atlantic, but it's so out of date by the time the monthly issue arrives that I've usually read everything online already, so I'm not sure how practical it is. The others I encounter almost exclusively online. Right now, I subscribe to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Wired. The Guardian doesn't have a subscription model, but you can donate whenever you like. I probably should subscribe to ProPublica, too.

Sage Goodwin (00:42:49):

Fair enough. So, if you're a news junkie, what counts as your junk food?

Josh Pasek (00:42:53):

Maybe that kind of is my junk food—that’s the problem. So yeah, I need help! But to the extent that there's junk food, right now it's mostly that I'm trying to introduce my kids to media. It's not really that junky, but—

Hanna Sistek (00:43:14):

How old are they?

Josh Pasek (00:43:15):

I have a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old. I'm trying very hard to curate things so they get quality content. Left to their own devices, they just want to watch people playing Minecraft on YouTube, which is really horrible stuff. I can't stand those vicarious Minecraft-watching videos. Instead, I'm introducing them to a lot of British humor, like Monty Python and Doctor Who. During Halloween, I even showed them Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm trying to find the high-quality stuff from a while ago. There’s so much media out there that we'll never get through it all, so my goal is to figure out what cultural landmarks I need to introduce them to so they have a framework to work off of. Maybe they'll never develop a normal kid's sense of humor, but whatever.

Sage Goodwin (00:44:08):

That range of references is going to be amazing.

Josh Pasek (00:44:12):

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Hanna Sistek (00:44:15):

I'm just wondering, because I have an 8-year-old myself: when they ask for your phone, do you just put on Fawlty Towers? What does curating their feed actually look like in practice?

Josh Pasek (00:44:26):

If they ask for my phone, I try to follow up by asking, "Why? What do you actually want to do on it?" If I can avoid engaging and just ignore the request entirely, I tend to do that. We also rarely pull out the iPads.

Another thing I really love about how we handle media at home is that we actually don't have a TV. I use a projection screen, which naturally introduces friction. The act of watching something takes a couple of minutes—the projector has to warm up, I have to physically pull down the screen, and then wait for the Apple TV startup sequence. I love it because it prevents us from watching by default. I have to make a deliberate decision to watch something, which means we watch way less crap than we would otherwise.

Sage Goodwin (00:45:20):

So the activation energy required to actually watch something is quite high.

Josh Pasek (00:45:26):

Exactly. We have so many media options right now that are so low-friction that you just end up consuming them without thinking. It's completely unintentional and not helpful. I'm still trying to figure out a better system for my phone, because having BlueSky right there means there's way too little friction. For a while, it helped to turn my phone onto grayscale mode. It strips the color out, making it much less visually stimulating. Finding ways to stop the phone from grabbing my attention and pulling me in is my current goal. I wouldn't say I'm super successful at it yet, but the friction on the TV setup is awesome.

Sage Goodwin (00:46:06):

Have you heard of a device called the Brick? A few people I know use it.

Josh Pasek (00:46:11):

I've heard of it, but I'm not sure I'd use it properly. We'll see.

Sage Goodwin (00:46:16):

It's a little square physical device. The idea is that you place it somewhere slightly inconvenient, like downstairs by the garden door, far away from your office, bedroom, or living room. When you tap your phone against it, you can customize exactly what apps are allowed to function. From that point on, you might only have access to your basic texts and calls, blocking everything else—Instagram, BlueSky, news alerts, you name it. It essentially turns your smartphone into a dumb phone, and the only way to reverse it is to physically walk back over and tap the Brick again. There's no remote workaround.

Hanna Sistek (00:47:21):

So you actually have to walk down the stairs.

Sage Goodwin (00:47:23):

Exactly. It massively increases the friction required to mindlessly check your phone. A lot of people fall into that loop where they open Instagram, then X, then BlueSky, then check their email, and by the time they finish the circuit, it's time to start all over again because something might have updated. It completely breaks that cycle.

Josh Pasek (00:47:44):

Yeah, I think that would be great. Sometimes the problem is just those mindless pivots. I'll go on Facebook to check Marketplace for something specific, and before I know it, the algorithm reroutes me and I'm watching these ridiculous random videos. You catch yourself and think, "Why am I doing this? I had zero interest in watching videos." I really have no interest in Facebook anymore and rarely use it otherwise, but Marketplace somehow still sucks me into those loops.

Julius Freeman (00:48:12):

Yes. But I think you hit on something that offers real hope on a practical level when you mentioned what you're doing with your children. I'm not saying this current generation is entirely lost, but there is real hope for the next generation based on the kind of stimulants we expose them to. As parents and educators raising them, we can actively put a hindrance on that dopamine cycle.

Josh Pasek (00:48:49):

I think that's a good idea. At the same time, we want to be careful because these devices are tied to important cultural and educational tools, so we have to figure out where to draw the line. The problem is that it's a slippery slope; you start using it for something valid, and then all of a sudden—crap, there went three hours.

Sage Goodwin (00:49:10):

Yeah. But I really love that concept of intentionally increasing friction to be more mindful. To wrap things up: let's talk about the palate cleanser. Since you don't have much traditional junk food, what do you do to truly step away from the screens and the news cycle?

Josh Pasek (00:49:24):

Honestly, teaching serves that purpose to some degree because I am completely tuned out from the digital world for that block of time. Spending time with my kids naturally forces me into "kid mode" too. But recently, I've also started taking theater improv classes. It's been wonderfully entertaining and offers a fantastic opportunity to completely avoid my phone for a while.

Sage Goodwin (00:49:51):

Oh, amazing! Improv is a phenomenal way to force yourself to be entirely in the moment.

Here is the final cleaned-up and polished segment of the transcript, bringing the episode to a smooth and professional close.

Julius Freeman (00:49:57):

I bet you're great at it. You're very quick on your feet and incredibly nimble. Well, this was a wonderful conversation, and I know I got a lot out of it. I'm sure Sage and Hanna did as well, and we really appreciate you joining us. Our last question for you is: where can our listeners find more of your work?

Josh Pasek (00:50:14):

I'll plug my website: joshpasek.com. That's J-O-S-H-P-A-S-E-K.com. I post most of my updates and projects there, and it links out to my BlueSky feed if anyone wants to engage with that. That's probably the easiest place to find my work directly. Of course, you can also look me up through the University of Michigan.

Sage Goodwin (00:50:37):

Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Josh.

Hanna Sistek (00:50:39):
Thanks so much.

Josh Pasek (00:50:40):
Yeah, thank you all.

Julius Freeman (00:50:41):

This has been another episode of Captivated. It's been hosted by a CAPT you know, CAPTivated you. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology. 

Hanna Sistek (00:50:55):

The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to policy of institutional neutrality. 

Sage Goodwin (00:51:04):

To learn more about this episode's guest, check out this show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening.