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"This book explores the effects of both old and new conservative media on political attitudes and attitude-consistent behavioral intentions. The author combines the latest neuro-cognitive research and theories on information and misinformation processing and attitudinal development with extensive scholarship on media priming, framing, agenda-setting, and cultivation effects, to put forth a new working media effects theory. Drawing on three longitudinal experimental studies from the US and UK, the book promotes an interdisciplinary and complex-systems based model of media effects that explains how conservative media mixes with cognitive-psychological, cultural-political, social interactional, and situational factors, contexts, and mechanisms to influence political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Informing the development and application of new social and digital research methods with improved ecological validity, the study will contribute new experiment-based findings on how old and digital news media can mediate or moderate electoral decisions. This truly interdisciplinary study draws on the fields of media studies, communication, political sociology and cognitive science, and will be of interest to scholars and students working in these fields as well as media psychology, new media, and journalism"--

"This book combines leading theories from sociology, media-communications, developmental psychology and cognitive science, and draws on primary evidence from a unique mix of qualitative and quantitative studies to provide a nuanced account of how the conscious and non-conscious cognitive dimensions of people's subjectivities and everyday social practices contribute to the macro processes of neoliberal reproduction"--

"This book combines leading theories from sociology, media-communications, developmental psychology and cognitive science, and draws on primary evidence from a unique mix of qualitative and quantitative studies to provide a nuanced account of how the conscious and non-conscious cognitive dimensions of people's subjectivities and everyday social practices contribute to the macro processes of neoliberal reproduction"--

Disconcerting findings from nascent sociological research suggest that Western youth are developing subjectivities that reflect neoliberal discursive formations of self-interest, competitiveness, and materialism. However, propositions about: (1) the cognitive-affective mechanisms that explain how youth acquire and reproduce neoliberal ideology, or (2) the dispositions and behaviours that typify a neoliberal subject, remain vague. Therefore, this article provides a novel conceptualization of these two psychosocial facets that can help advance understandings and investigations of the emerging modes and societal consequences of neoliberal subjectification, Specifically, it reviews major theoretical tenets from the respective literatures on neurocognitive development, social cognition, neoliberalism, and neoliberal hegemony. It then synthesizes these tenets within a modified habitus formulation to sketch a testable cognitive-sociological model to explain and explore some of the distinct dispositional values, attitudes, and practices that youth raised in societies with institutionally and culturally prevalent neoliberal norms and discourses potentially may develop and enact.

There is growing worldwide concern that the rampant spread of digital fake news (DFN) via new media technologies is detrimentally impacting Democratic elections. However, the actual influence of this recent Internet phenomenon on electoral decisions has not been directly examined. Accordingly, this study tested the effects of attention to DFN on readers' Presidential candidate preferences via an experimental web-survey administered to a cross-sectional American sample (N = 552). Results showed no main effect of exposure to DFN on participants' candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, the perceived believability of DFN about the Democratic candidate negatively mediated evaluations of that candidate—especially amongst far-right ideologues. These results suggest that DFN may at worst reinforce the partisan dispositions of mostly politically conservative Internet users, but does not cause or induce conversions in these dispositions. Overall, this study contributes novel experimental evidence, indicating that the potential electoral impact of DFN, although concerning, is strongly conditional on a reciprocal interaction between message receptibility and a pre-existing right-wing ideological orientation. The said impact is, therefore, likely narrow in scope.