Эффект третьего лица в восприятии медиавлияния

Hypothesis in social sciences related to the perception of media effects

The third person effect hypothesis predicts that people tend to perceive that mass media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves, based on personal biases. The third person effect manifests itself through an individual's overestimation of the effect of a mass communicated message on the generalized other, or an underestimation of the effect of a mass communicated message on themselves. These types of perceptions stem from a self motivated social desirability (not feeling influenced by mass messages promotes self esteem), a social distance corollary (choosing to dissociate oneself from the others who may be influenced), and a perceived exposure to a message (others choose to be influenced by persuasive communication).

Sociologist W. Phillips Davison, who first articulated the third person effect hypothesis in 1983, explains that the phenomenon first piqued his interest in 1949 or 1950, when he learned of Japan's attempt during World War II to dissuade black U. S. soldiers from fighting at Iwo Jima using propaganda in the form of leaflets. As Davison recounts, the leaflets stressed that the Japanese did not have a quarrel with the black soldiers, and therefore they should give up or desert. Although there was no indication that the leaflets had any effect on the soldiers, the incident preceded a substantial reshuffle among the officers and the unit was withdrawn the next day.

According to Perloff (1999, 2009), two major factors facilitate the third person effect: judgments of message desirability and perceived social distance (social distance corollary). In their meta analysis of studies of third person perception Sun, Pan, and Shen (2008) found that message desirability is the most important moderator of third person perception. Third person effects are particularly pronounced when the message is perceived as undesirable—that is, when people infer that “this message may not be so good for me” or “it’s not cool to admit you’re influenced by this media program.” In line with these predictions, people have been found to perceive content that is typically thought to be antisocial to have a larger impact on others than on themselves (e. g., television violence, pornography, antisocial rap music). On the other hand, when messages are perceived as desirable, people are not so likely to exhibit a third person effect. According to Perloff (2009),

Another factor that influences the magnitude of the third person effect is perceived social distance between self and comparison others. In the “social distance corollary,” the disparity of self and other is increased as perceived distance between self and comparison others is increased. Assumed in social distance, is that people are more likely to think that someone will have a similar response to themselves if they share characteristics such as where they live, political affiliations and age. Attribution theory predicts that actors tend to attribute their actions to situational factors while observers tend to attribute the same actions to dispositional factors. For example, attribution theory predicts that a student who turns in a late assignment may explain to the professor that the tardiness is uncharacteristic and due to a situational factor like an unusual computer problem while the professor might believe the tardiness was due instead to a dispositional factor like the student's laziness. In the context of the third person effect hypothesis, then, attribution theory explains why a person may think that he or she understands the underlying persuasive aspects of the message while others’ dispositional flaws prevent them from perceiving those same aspects.

Multiple studies have found support for the behavioral component of the third person effect hypothesis. Possibly because Davison noted that censors seldom admit to have been adversely affected by the information they proscribe, television violence, cigarette, beer, liquor, and gambling advertising, rap music and the number of users being concurrently online on the same media website, the exact number of users having read each article on a media website as well as the number of users having shared a news article on Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks. support for an independent commission to regulate political communication, or censorship for a Holocaust denial advertisement.

Scholars have noted that in some situations, people don't always estimate greater media effects for others than for themselves. Indeed, in certain situations people tend to estimate greater media effects on themselves than on others, and in other situations people tend to estimate similar media effects on self and others. These two phenomena are commonly known as first person and second person effects respectively.

First person effects – the estimation of greater media effects on self than others – tends to happen in situations in which people judge it desirable to be influenced by the media message. Innes and Zeitz first documented this phenomenon in 1988 when they noticed that participants exposed to content with a violent message exhibited traditional third person effects while those exposed to a public service announcement exhibited the reverse. They described this reverse effect, however, only as “something akin to a third person effect” (p.461). Several years later, Cohen and Davis, who found that people tended to overestimate the effect of attack advertisements for disliked candidates on themselves than on others, coined the term “reverse third person effect” (p.687). The same year, Tiedge, Silverblatt, Havice, and Rosenfeld coined the term “first person effect” to refer to the perceived effects of media on self as being more than on others. Finally, Gunther & Thorson, in a study that paved the way for extension of the third person effect hypothesis, demonstrated empirically that the social desirability of the message tended to affect whether participants were likely to exhibit third or first person effects. Socially desirable messages, Gunther and Thorson argue, tend to produce first person effects while messages that are not perceived as desirable to be influenced by tend to produce traditional third person effects.

Only a handful of studies have, intentionally or unintentionally, examined the behavioral component of the first person effect. Of these, only one has specifically examined a relationship between first person perceptions and behavioral consequences. Day examined the relationship between first person effects from socially desirable issue advertisements and the likelihood of voting for legislation supporting the issue. Day found a significant relationship between first person perceptions of the advertisement and the reported likelihood of voting for the legislation.