Self-perceptions and misperceptions - Examining the antecedents and consequences of self-perceived media literacy

Abstract

The current media landscape provides arenas for public debate where virtually anyone can share their opinions and disseminate information (Strömbäck et.al 2022:57). Legacy media has traditionally held a gatekeeping role and curated the media supply, by being citizen's main source of news but this role has been undermined by media formats that lower the threshold for participation (Lechler & Egelhofer 2022:69-70). This has largely shifted the responsibility of navigating and assessing the truthfulness of media onto the individual. Because individuals are highly prone to directional biases, media literacy has become increasingly important (Journell 2024:25-26). Much of previous research within media literacy builds on an objective perspective of media literacy, but the issue with focusing exclusively on objective media literacy is that it is a perspective that does not account for the important influence of motivations, such as psychological and social circumstances (Journell 2024:29). Perceptions guide our actions, irrespectively of how representative they are of the real world (Lippman 2004). The self-perception of media literacy abilities is thus important regardless of their congruence with reality. The aim of this thesis is therefore to add to the sparse research on self-perceived media literacy and its implications for misperceptions, departing from the normative assumption that citizens need to be informed for a democracy to function well. This study contains a twofold analysis of self-perceived media literacy. First, antecedents in the categories demographic variables, political variables and media variables were examined using hierarchical regressions on panel data. Second, a stepwise regression was used to explore the relationship between media literacy and misperceptions within the topics immigration, vaccines and crime. The results demonstrate that within demographic variables, higher educated (b=.298 p<.001) and men (b=.211 p<.001) reported higher self-perceived media literacy. Political variables had the strongest explanatory value out of the three categories of variables (ΔR²=.090 p<.000), and showed that higher self-perceived media literacy was reported by respondents with higher political knowledge (b=.398 p<.001) , higher political interest (b=987 p<.001) and that were far to the right (b=.195 p<.01). Finally all media use variables included except left-wing alternative media use were also positively related with self-perceived media literacy. In the second analysis, only vaccine perceptions were found to have a significant relationship with self-perceived media literacy (b=.051 p<.05).