Opinions, information avoidance, and online polarization in the Philippines

When forming opinions, people often ignore potentially useful information even when it is freely accessible. Such information avoidance may lead to the formation of distorted opinions that could, in turn, fuel polarization. Using a lab experiment, this paper uncovers how peer engagement and information avoidance impact opinion formation among Filipino students on a controversial social issue, to wit, the death penalty. At baseline, we asked subjects about their opinions on the death penalty and measured their general tendencies to avoid information. Participants were then prompted into online conversations where they randomly received information that either supported or opposed their opinion. We measured how subjects spent their time on the internet and recorded the clicks on different information sources using tracking software. We find that the peer opposition treatment increases engagement with opposing information but did not affect total time allocations for information engagement. Subjects displaying higher tendencies of information avoidance engaged less with opposing information, even if the costs of acquiring this information were low. Results suggest that exposure to diverse social networks may de-polarize opinions, given the right conditions. We interpret our findings with respect to the literature on information avoidance, belief formation in social networks, and within the Filipino context.