Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rapid rise in popularity of spoken-word audio channels (e.g., podcasts, streaming news sites) as a source for news and product information. In this work we investigate how listening to versus reading the same news information alters how it is interpreted by consumers. Three large-sample experiments (N = 4,589) find that when consumers listen to (vs. read) news that presents different sides of an issue, they form more reductive and negatively-biased interpretations of its content—biases that are then relayed to others through word of mouth. This difference is explained by the greater cognitive load on processing induced by listening, which leads listeners to selectively encode its more salient elements—here the more negative. Consistent with this, the negativity bias in listening versus reading is shown to increase when consumers listen to news while multitasking, but attenuates when consumers read news under similar cognitive constraints as those imposed on listening. Implications are discussed for how consumption modalities might affect the fidelity of consumer knowledge, as well as potential interventions for attenuating these biases.