Hearing and Talking to the Other Side: Antecedents of Cross-Cutting Exposure in Adolescents

Although scholars have enthusiastically examined the outcomes of cross-cutting exposure, few studies have explored its antecedents. Moreover, most studies have attended to adults. But it is during adolescence and early adulthood that citizens are most likely to be socialized into valuing and engaging in heterogeneous discussion. The present study employs a panel survey of American adolescents, age 12 to 17, to examine the predictive power of home, school, and media use variables on two outcomes related to valuing and talking to the other side. Our findings demonstrate that adolescents’ attitudes toward valuing cross-cutting exposure as well as indulging in heterogeneous talk are consistently predicted by concept-oriented home environment and school curriculum. Among the media variables, cable news negatively and newspaper and online news positively influenced our outcome variables. Implications are discussed.