The Third Person Effect relates to a perceptual bias that leads people to believe that they are less susceptible to being persuaded by media than others. This idea was introduced in 1983 by sociologist W. Phillips Davison, it reflects the perception that others are more vulnerable to persuasion or negative impacts of media than "I am."
There are two facets of human nature that support this idea:
- Illusion of Invulnerability: We want to protect our sense of control over our own lives. Because of that, we believe that we are less vulnerable to negative influences compared to others. One way that we do that is assuming that ads only work on others and not ourselves.
- Poor Self-Knowledge: We really don't know what goes on in our own brains. Many of our own intuitions about how our brains work are scrambled and subject to different biases like the illusion of invulnerability.
It is hard for people to believe that we don't know everything that goes on in our minds. But if we were to acknowledge the fact that we will never understand, we would be able to protect our minds of persuasive advertising easier and take back control for ourselves.
There was a telephone survey of 721 adults that examined the impact of the third-person effect on individuals' perception of media and immortality effects with three issues. The perceptual hypothesis predicts that other people will be persuaded by media more than themselves. The behavioral hypothesis predicts that the third-person perception will lead to support for restrictions on media messages. In the end, the findings confirmed the support for the perceptual hypothesis. These hypotheses led to a few studies in the 1990s but later in the early 2000s research led to total of 135 studies.
Researchers wanted to see how much people thought they were affected by persuasive messages and compare it to attitude changes. During the studies, the participants watched an ad, read a newspaper, or another form of a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much they thought it would influence other people as well as themselves. After completing the studies, they found that participants thought others would be influenced but they would remain unaffected. This was then dubbed the 'third-person effect.'
People underestimate how much they actually get affected by persuasive media. It can affect their behaviors, there are many things that could be a result of the third person effect. It also leads to people to believe that others are more gullible which pushes different stereotypes even more.
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