Persuasion: The Third-Person Effect

Why people think they are less influenced than others by adverts and persuasive
messages.
One of the most intriguing things about the psychology of persuasion is how many people
say that persuasion attempts have little or no effect on them. Other people, oh sure,
adverts, work on them. But not you and I, were too clever for that.
Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are? We
know what theyre doing and we wouldnt fall for such cheap tactics.
Would we?
Persuasive experiments
So pervasive is this feeling that only other people are influenced by things like adverts
that many studies have explored the idea, with an initial surge in the 1980s and 90s.
Psychologists wanted to see how much people thought they were influenced by
persuasive messages like adverts and compare it with actual attitude changes, if any.
Typically these studies first got participants to watch an advert, read a newspaper article
or other medium containing a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much it
had influenced them and how much it might influence other people. Since the
experimenters measured actual persuasion and knew from previous research how
influential the messages were, they could compare peoples guesses with reality.
What they found, in study after study, was that participants thought others would be
influenced by the message, but that they themselves would remain unaffected. When
psychologists looked at the results, though, it was clear that participants were just as
influenced as other people. This was dubbed the third-person effect.
Third-person effect
Reviewing the research in this area, Perloff (1993) found that studies on political adverts,
defamatory news stories, public service announcements and many more all showed a
robust third-person effect. Similar conclusions were reached by Paul et al. (2000), who
looked at 32 separate studies.
Perloff also found that when people dont agree with the message or judge its source as
negative, the third-person effect became even stronger. The effect is also stronger when
messages arent directly relevant to people.
In other words people are likely to be influenced more than they think on subjects that are
currently of little or no interest to them. An everyday example would be seeing an advert
for a car, when youre not in the market for a new car. Wed probably guess it has little or
no influence on us, but this research suggests wed be wrong.
Take back control
The third-person effect is unusual because it goes against the general finding that we
overestimate other peoples similarity to ourselves.
This is what psychologists call the false consensus effect: we tend to assume that others
hold more similar opinions and have more similar attributes and personalities to ourselves
than they really do.
The third-person effect, though, goes in the other direction. When it comes to influence,
instead of thinking other people are similar to us, we think theyre different. There are
two facets of human nature that support this exception:
! Illusion of invulnerability. People prefer to believe that they are, on average, less
vulnerable than others to negative influences, like unwanted persuasion attempts.
We all want to protect our sense of control over our lives. One way we do that is
to assume that ads only work on other people.
! Poor self-knowledge. Although its an unpalatable idea, we often dont know whats
really going on in our own minds (see the hidden workings of the mind). Not only
does this make scientific psychology a tricky enterprise, it also means that many
of our intuitions about the way our own minds work are scrambled and subject to
biases like the illusion of invulnerability. The effect of persuasive messages is a
good example of this.
People often react to this sort of research by saying its disheartening, which it is. Its not
a happy thought that we dont know how easily we are influenced because we dont
really know whats going on in our own minds.
However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending influence attempts dont work is
likely to increase our vulnerability. On the other hand, if we acknowledging our lack of
insight into our own thought processes, we can raise our defences against the power of
advertising and messages of influence, and take back control for ourselves.

Source: http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/08/persuasion-the-third-person-effect.php