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Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement

By on July 21, 2026 in Articles

Christopher Barrie, Aybuke Atalay, Alia ElKattan

Sociological Science July 21, 2026
10.15195/v13.a33

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What political content do we pay attention to online? Diverse political information is essential for democratic competence, yet online media raises concerns about fragmented information diets. Research on selective exposure highlights how social media can foster ideological echo chambers, while other studies emphasize incidental exposure to diverse viewpoints. A critical measurement challenge is that public platform traces often observe engagement (e.g., likes or shares) more readily than lower-visibility forms of attention—i.e., what users notice or choose to read without necessarily interacting publicly. In this study, we address this gap with a social media clone platform that separately records attention and engagement. We ran the study in both the United Kingdom (once) and the United States (thrice). Across both contexts, we found that the ideology-engagement association is significantly larger than the ideology-attention association. This underscores the importance of measuring attention, rather than solely engagement, to accurately assess the diversity of online information diets.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Christopher Barrie: Department of Sociology, New York University.
E-mail: cb5691@nyu.edu

Aybuke Atalay: Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh.
E-mail: aybuke.atalay@ed.ac.uk

Alia ElKattan: Department of Politics, New York University.
E-mail: alia.elkattan@nyu.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank audiences at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2223 230865). OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-5 and Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.5) were used for code, code review, and manuscript redrafting. The authors declare no competing interests. Corresponding author: Christopher Barrie (cb5691@nyu.edu).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data, code, documentation, and replication materials necessary to re-produce the empirical and simulation results reported in this article are available at https://github.com/cjbarrie/smclone.


  • Citation: Barrie, Christopher, Aybuke Atalay, and Alia ElKattan. 2026. “Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement” Sociological Science 13: 864-883.
  • Received: April 9, 2026
  • Accepted: June 8, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healy
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a33


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Better in the Shadows? Public Attention, Media Coverage, and Market Reactions to Female CEO Announcements

By on May 17, 2021 in Articles

Edward Bishop Smith, Jillian Chown, and Kevin Gaughan

Sociological Science May 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a7

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Combining media coverage data from approximately 17,000 unique media outlets with the full population of CEO appointments for U.S. publicly traded firms between 2000 and 2016, we investigate whether female CEO appointments garner more public attention compared with male appointments, and if so, whether this increased attention can help make sense of the previously reported negative market reaction to these events. Contrary to prior reports, our data do not indicate that the appointments of female CEOs elicit overly negative market reactions, on average. Our results do highlight an important moderating role of public attention, however. We demonstrate that greater attention—even when exogenously determined—contributes to negative market reactions for female CEO appointments but positive market reactions for male CEOs, all else held constant. Additionally, female CEO appointments that attract little attention garner significant positive responses in the market, compared with both male CEOs drawing similarly limited levels of attention and female CEOs drawing high levels of attention. Our results help to reconcile contrasting empirical findings on the effects of gender in executive leadership and parallel recent work on anticipatory bias and second-order discrimination in alternative empirical contexts. Implications for research on attention, gender bias, and executive succession are discussed.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Edward Bishop Smith: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
E-mail: ned-smith@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Jillian Chown: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
E-mail: jillian.chown@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Kevin Gaughan: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (formerly)
E-mail: kevin.gaughan@northwestern.edu

Acknowledgments: We have benefitted from the advice of Jeanne Brett, Roberto Fernandez, Brayden King, Maxim Sytch, Ed Zajac, FilippoWezel, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at MIT, Harvard,Washington University, and Dartmouth. Correspondence may be directed to Ned Smith, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, ned-smith@kellogg.northwestern.edu.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Smith, Edward Bishop, Jillian Chown, and Kevin Gaughan. 2021. “Better in the Shadows? Public Attention, Media Coverage, and Market Reactions to Female CEO Announcements.” Sociological Science 8: 119-149.
  • Received: February 10, 2021
  • Accepted: March 7, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a7


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