PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Third-Person Effect

What it is

People believe that persuasive messages influence other people more than themselves, and act on that belief — supporting restrictions for others, lowering their own guard, and changing behaviour in anticipation of how others will be swayed.

How it works

W. Phillips Davison proposed in 1983 that people expect mass communication to influence others more than themselves. His opening example was a Second World War unit of Black American soldiers withdrawn from Iwo Jima after Japanese leaflets urged them not to fight for white officers; the troops were unmoved, but their white commanders assumed they would not be. Two meta-analyses, Paul, Salwen and Dupagne in 2000 and Sun, Pan and Shen in 2008, found the perceptual gap robust across topics and countries, larger for messages judged socially undesirable and for “others” who are distant or dissimilar. The gap has two sources: self-enhancement, since being influenced is a weakness we attribute elsewhere, and genuine ignorance of our own persuasion, since influence rarely announces itself. The effect has a behavioural side, which is where it is exploited. Because people believe others are the vulnerable ones, they support restrictions on what others may see while insisting they need none themselves — Rojas, Shah and Faber found third-person perception predicts support for censorship — and they act on presumed influence, as Gunther and Storey showed, changing their own behaviour because they assume others have been swayed. The persuader who says “advertising does not work on people like you” is cashing the effect at its most literal.

Real-world examples

  • •Davison's Iwo Jima case: Japanese leaflets aimed at Black American troops moved none of them but persuaded their white officers to withdraw the unit.
  • •Support for restricting violent video games, explicit lyrics and pornography has come mainly from people who report no effect of the material on themselves, and support for restricting “misinformation” follows the same pattern from the other direction; each side is confident the other side's audience is the one being fooled.
  • •Panic buying during fuel shortages and in the early pandemic weeks of 2020 was driven substantially by people who did not believe the shortage claims but assumed others would — the influence of presumed influence, in a queue.
  • •Self-aware advertising — the campaign that jokes about advertising, the brand that says it knows you are too smart for slogans — trades on the reader's certainty that advertisements move other people.
  • •Partisans on both sides describe the other side's media diet as brainwashing and their own as information; surveys find each side rating itself far less influenced by its preferred outlets than the other side is by theirs.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Teaching people that persuasion works on them as much as on anyone is education; exploiting their sense of immunity to lower their guard, or invoking other people's supposed vulnerability to justify controlling what those people may see while exempting oneself, is manipulation.

  • ●When arguing for restrictions on what others may see, apply the same standard to your own sources; if you would not accept the restriction for yourself, examine why you accept it for them.
  • ●Do not tell an audience that persuasion does not work on people like them; it is false, and its purpose is to lower the guard the claim pretends to praise.
  • ●Report influence honestly: if your campaign works, it works on the people you are addressing, not only on some other, weaker audience.

How to defend against it

  • ►Assume you are the third person. Any message you believe is manipulating other people is, on the evidence, working on you at a rate you cannot feel; check your own beliefs on the topic against a source you would not have chosen.
  • ►When you notice yourself supporting a restriction on what others may see, run the swap: would you accept it applied to your own side's equivalent? If not, the effect is doing your reasoning.
  • ►Before acting on what you think others will do — buying, selling, queuing, voting strategically — ask what you actually know about their behaviour rather than about the message they received.
  • ►Treat “you are too smart for this to affect you” as a persuasion move and answer it as one: “then you will not mind if I take a day to think.”

References

  1. Davison, W. P. (1983). The third-person effect in communication. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47(1), 1-15
    The original statement of the effect, including the Iwo Jima leaflet case.
  2. Sun, Y., Pan, Z., & Shen, L. (2008). Understanding the third-person perception: Evidence from a meta-analysis. Journal of Communication, 58(2), 280-300
    Meta-analysis confirming a robust perceptual gap and its moderators, including message desirability and social distance.
  3. Paul, B., Salwen, M. B., & Dupagne, M. (2000). The third-person effect: A meta-analysis of the perceptual hypothesis. Mass Communication & Society, 3(1), 57-85
    The first meta-analysis of the perceptual component.
  4. Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Faber, R. J. (1996). For the good of others: Censorship and the third-person effect. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 8(2), 163-186
    Third-person perception predicts support for censorship of media content.
  5. Gunther, A. C., & Storey, J. D. (2003). The influence of presumed influence. Journal of Communication, 53(2), 199-215
    People change their own behaviour on the assumption that others have been influenced by a message.
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