The Third-Person Effect 40 Years After Davison Penned It: What We Know and Where We Should Traverse

ABSTRACT

Forty years ago in 1983, W. Phillips Davison coined the term “third-person effect,” generating a robust outpouring of research. This paper places the third-person effect in the contemporary age, one vastly different from the era in which Davison conceptualized perceptions of media effects. The article first describes the historical, sociological climate in which Davison operated, noting how the concept congealed with the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1980s. The paper then provides a critical synthesis of research on the self-other perceptual disparity and the behavioral corollary, focusing on early studies, moderators, mediators, and meta-analytic findings. After describing problems and complexities in third-person research, we ponder implications for the very different media and political psychological climate of 2023. We propose four specific research questions and four testable propositions, building on classic and contemporary theory and research.

This article is related to:

Another Point of View: Scholarly Responses to the State of Third-Person Research

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Notes on contributors

Richard M. Perloff

Richard M. Perloff (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ohio State University) is a professor of communication, psychology, and political science at Cleveland State University. Building on his research interests on the psychology of media effects, he has published widely on the third-person effect and has written books on persuasion, political communication, and news.

Lijiang Shen

Lijiang Shen (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2005) is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include the impact of message features and audience characteristics in persuasive health communication, message processing, and the process of persuasion/resistance to persuasion as well as quantitative research methods in communication.