Tolerating Toxicity: How Incivility and Belief Congruence in User-Generated Comments Affect Readers’ Motivational Activation and Information Intake

By conceptualizing incivility and belief congruence in online comments as message features that elicit motivational system activation, this study investigates how these features influence readers’ real-time psychophysiological responses, self-reported emotional responses, memory, and behavioral intention. The findings revealed that uncivil comments did not elicit stronger physiological responses (i.e. skin conductance and corrugator activity) than civil ones, suggesting that social media users may not be highly reactive to incivility in online news comments. In contrast, belief-incongruent comments triggered increased anger and behavioral approach tendencies. Further, for belief-congruent comments, memory encoding was more accurate and sensitive for uncivil comments than civil ones.