[2] Sociologist W. Phillips Davison, who first articulated the third-person effect hypothesis in 1983, explains that the phenomenon first piqued his interest in 1949 or 1950, when he learned of Japan's attempt during World War II to dissuade black U.S. soldiers from fighting at Iwo Jima using propaganda in the form of leaflets.
Although there was no indication that the leaflets had any effect on the soldiers, the incident preceded a substantial reshuffle among the officers and the unit was withdrawn the next day.
The study asked subjects to estimate the effects of listening to these types of lyrics on someone's behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes.
Furthermore, a recent study conducted by Nikos Antonopoulos et al. (2015)[2] found characteristics of what users observe when visiting a media website as well as a prediction model.
[1] Price and Tewksbury tested whether the third-person effect was a methodological artifact as a result of asking participants self-other questions in close proximity.
[7] Third-person effects are particularly pronounced when the message is perceived as undesirable—that is, when people infer that “this message may not be so good for me” or “it’s not cool to admit you’re influenced by this media program.” In line with these predictions, people have been found to perceive content that is typically thought to be antisocial to have a larger impact on others than on themselves (e.g., television violence, pornography, antisocial rap music).
[13][14] Assumed in social distance, is that people are more likely to think that someone will have a similar response to themselves if they share characteristics such as where they live, political affiliations and age.
In the context of the third-person effect hypothesis, biased optimism explains why people judge themselves as being less likely than others to be affected by persuasion.
[5] One year later, Paul, Salwen, and Dupagne conducted a meta-analysis of 32 empirical analyses that tested the perceptual component of the third-person effect hypothesis.
Possibly because Davison noted that censors seldom admit to have been adversely affected by the information they proscribe,[1] scholars who have found support for the behavioral component have generally operationalized behavior as a willingness to censor content to stop the content from having the perceived negative persuasive impact on others.
[5] Specifically, scholars have demonstrated that third-person perception predicts willingness to censor pornography,[16][17] television violence,[17] sexual and violent television in Singapore,[10] cigarette, beer, liquor, and gambling advertising,[18] rap music[3] and the number of users being concurrently online on the same media website, the exact number of users having read each article on a media website as well as the number of users having shared a news article on Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks.
[2] Scholars, however, have not found that third-person perception predicts willingness to censor news or political media content including censorship of press coverage of the O.J.
Simpson trial,[19] support for an independent commission to regulate political communication,[20] or censorship for a Holocaust-denial advertisement.
Day found a significant relationship between first-person perceptions of the advertisement and the reported likelihood of voting for the legislation.