Persuasion: The Third-Person Effect
Introduction (via PsyBlog)
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, we’re too clever for that.
Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are? We know what they’re doing and we wouldn’t fall for such cheap tactics.
Would we?
Additional Excerpt (via Psyblog)
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 don’t agree with the message or judge its source as negative, the third-person effect became even stronger. The effect is also stronger when messages aren’t 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 you’re not in the market for a new car. We’d probably guess it has little or no influence on us, but this research suggests we’d be wrong.
