Abstract: Balanced information exposure has been regarded as an effective approach to break the information cocoon. However, while people hope this new way to require information will completely break the information cocoon, they ignore that the selective perception mechanism rooted in people’s hearts can still make them be resistant to change their attitudes. Until now, there is still a lack of empirical evidence on whether balanced information exposure can really promote attitudinal change and play an effective role in breaking the information cocoon. A total of 39 participants were recruited to browse a mocked health knowledge Q&A platform and read two answers from opposite positions on a controversial topic. After finishing reading, they were asked to evaluate the perceived credibility, persuasiveness, and importance of each answer. Besides, their prior and posterior attitudes were collected through questionnaires before and after the experiment. The results reveal that balanced information exposure can alleviate and change some people’s attitudes, and avoid polarization for everyone. However, the selective perception phenomenon is found in a small number of people, which plays a key role in resisting attitudinal change and breaking the information cocoon. According to the results of this study, the effective way for balanced information exposure to alleviate polarization is to improve people’s perceived credibility and persuasiveness of the counter-attitudinal information. Besides, when trying to change the valence of attitudes, it’s necessary to not only improve people’s perceived credibility, persuasiveness, and importance of counter-attitudinal information but also decrease people’s perceived persuasiveness and importance of the pro-attitudinal information. This study provides theoretical implications and methodological guidance for future research, as well as some practical implications for breaking the information cocoons and correcting online rumors.

Key words: Information cocoons, Balanced information exposure, Information perception, Selective perception, Attitudinal change