Expressive News Preferences: Identity-Signaling in News Selection

In polarized media environments, individuals’ news preferences may reflect identity signaling rather than genuine informational needs. This study introduces the concept of expressive news preferences—inflated news selections relative to actual news consumption. A preregistered web-based experiment with a national U.S. sample (N = 1,280) tested how consumption expectation and selection publicity influence attitude-consistent news choices. Participants selected gun control headlines under one of four conditions varying by whether they expected to read the full articles, and whether their selections were imagined to be public or private. Results show that participants selected significantly more attitude-consistent news when they did not expect to consume the content. Expressive bias did not significantly vary by selection publicity, but moderate partisans exhibited greater expressive bias than other groups. These findings highlight identity-signaling tendencies in low-cost selection contexts and caution against interpreting selection-based preference measures as direct reflections of real-world news consumption.