Have you ever watched a campaign commercial that smears your favorite candidate or praises one you dislike and thought something like this? “I know most of that isn’t true. I’m not believing this. It just makes me mad that there are some people out there who will trust these lies and vote accordingly. I mean, I can see through this nonsense, but not everyone else can.” Or have you ever watched a weight loss commercial or stared at a beauty advertisement and thought "Who would fall for this?" Advertising doesn’t affect you, does it? But it does influence your friends and neighbors, right? If you agree with those sentiments, as many do, you’re falling prey to what’s become known as the “third-person effect.” Davison (1983) defines the third-person effect hypothesis as the likelihood that “individuals who are members of an audience that is exposed to a persuasive communication (whether or not this communication is intended to be persuasive) will expect the communication to have a greater effect on others than on themselves.” It’s the not me but you mentality. As it turns out, advertising is effective on all of us, even you and me. We’re just notoriously bad at figuring out our own motives, especially when it comes to sensing the subconscious, half-conscious, and unconscious desires and impulses that drive much of our behavior. But we’re much better at the cool observation of others, so we can see that advertising works on “the masses” and even on our friends and neighbors. Hence the third-person effect: “advertising doesn’t work on me, but it sure seems to affect others.” This error in thought occurs when you assume that most people are gullible, prejudicial or ignorant in ways that you are not. It often involves assuming the worst about a large group’s motives or intelligence. If you find yourself feeling like an “exception to the rule,” (whatever that rule might be), there is a good chance that you are making this mistake. If everyone thinks they aren’t gullible and can’t be swayed by advertising, political rhetoric, or charismatic con artists, then someone must be deluding themselves. Sometimes it’s you.
Individuals often experience an urge to inflate their qualities or trivialize their limitations, to perceive themselves more favorably, called self-enhancement. The third person effect might represent an attempt to fulfill this motive and perceive themselves as superior. Consistent with this perspective, the third person effect diminishes when the message advocates some positive or desirable behavior. In one study, for example, some of the messages championed desirable inclinations, such as empathy and sympathy towards deprived individuals. The third person effect diminished when the message encouraged positive behavior (Duck & Mullin, 1995& Gunther & Mundy, 1993& Hoorens & Ruiter, 1996). You don’t want to believe you can be persuaded, and one way of maintaining this belief is to assume that all the persuasion flying through the air must be landing on other targets. Otherwise, how could it be successful? Those advertisements for cheeseburgers are for people who love to eat greasy fast food, you think until you are ravenous and are forced to choose between one fast food place and another. Those alcohol billboards are for trendy hipsters, you assume, until you are at the office Christmas party and the guy at the open bar asks you what you want. Public service announcements about texting while driving is for people who don’t live the kind of life you do, you think until you find yourself feeling a twinge of shame when you reach for the phone to respond to an email while waiting on the light to turn green. When you watch your preferred news channel or read your favorite newspaper or blog, you tend to believe you are an independent thinker. You may disagree with people on the issues, but you see yourself as having an open mind, as a person who looks at the facts and reaches conclusions after rational objective analysis. The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent and more skilled than you are. Research into the self-serving bias shows subjects tend to rate themselves as more skilled than their coworkers, better drivers than the average person, more attractive than people their age and likely to live longer than the people they grew up with. Presumably, to perceive themselves favorably, individuals like to feel they are inclined to act positively. This inclination might offset their usual motivation to appear insensitive to persuasive messages. In these instances, to fulfill self-enhancement motives, individuals like to feel they are immune to messages that promulgate unsuitable behavior. However, some factors have been shown to influence the size of this third-person effect. To illustrate, when the message revolves around a political issue, the third person effect escalates. Similarly, if the message seems ambiguous, this effect is also more pronounced.
So, don’t you sit on your couch and complain about how unrealistic the ad for the car is, and wonder who might actually believe it. Because you might be pleasantly surprised one day when you decide to test drive a car because you happened to see a billboard for it.
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