Object-subject distance and the TPE –
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I am more influenced when I know less, and they are less influenced when they know more:
Object-subject distance and the third person effect
It is a well-known finding of media research that people perceive others as
more influenced by the mass media than they themselves are. As W. Phillip Davison
(1983) put it, people believe that the media’s greatest impact “will not be on ‘me’ or
‘you,’ but on ‘them’ – the third persons” (p. 3). His landmark article and many
studies that followed defined this third person effect (TPE) as the perceptual gap
between the beliefs about the effects of media on the self and on others (for recent
reviews see Paul, Salwen & Dupagne, 2000; Perloff, 2002). A meta-analysis (Paul,
Salwen & Dupagne, 2000) investigating 121 separate effects found substantial and
highly significant effects. Furthermore, research tells us that people both tend to
overestimate the effects of the media on others and to underestimate the effects of the
media on themselves (Salwen, 1998).
Several explanations have been offered for the TPE. According to Perloff
(2002), “the prevailing interpretation is that the third person effect is a subset of a
universal human tendency to perceive the self in ways that make us look good or at
least better than other people” (p. 493). Other explanations (e.g. Gunther, 1991;
Gunther & Mundy, 1993; Perloff 2002) include “biased optimism” (people judge
themselves as less likely than others to receive negative consequences), need for
control (people feel that if they are influenced by their frequent encounters with mass
communications, they have less control over their lives, a situation they are motivated
to avoid) or projection (people simply project the fact that they are influenced by the
media on others). More cognitive explanations claim that the TPE results from the
fundamental attribution error (people underestimate others’ awareness of the
persuasive situation while overestimating others’ dispositional flaws, such as
Convention