Page 155 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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EFFECT
THIRD-PERSON
news features similarly invited jaded presentations. Finally, as prominent net-
work anchors and correspondents became celebrities, narcissism enveloped pre-
sentation. Network anchors and correspondents made themselves the center of
stories.
SOURCES: Kiku Adatto, Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making,
1993; Edward Bliss, Jr., Now the News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism, 1991.
James L. Baughman

THIRD-PERSON EFFECT is an increasingly popular theory of public opinion
enunciated by sociologist W. Philips Davison in 1983. The effect consists of
two components: (1) a perceptual component that predicts people perceive the
mass media to be more effective in influencing other people than themselves
and (2) an action component that predicts people act on this perception to sup-
port restrictions (i.e., censorship) on the media to "protect" vulnerable others
from harmful consequences. The perceptual component was summarized in an
oft-cited quotation by Davison that "in the view of those trying to evaluate the
effects of a communication, its greatest impact will not be on 'me' or 'you,'
but on 'them'—the third person." The perceptual component enjoys a good
deal of empirical support. Only recently, however, have researchers begun to
investigate the action component. Two possible political consequences of the
third-person effect are that policymakers, elites, and even the general public will
support media restrictions to ' 'protect'' the public from perceived harmful mes-
sages (e.g., sex and violence) and that policymakers will take political action in
response to media reports of social ills that they anticipate will mobilize the
public to demand that the ills be corrected. Few empirical studies have extended
the third-person effect to elections. One such study by Rucinski and Salmon
during the 1988 presidential campaign found support for the perceptual com-
ponent. They reported that people perceived five types of media content about
the election (news, political ads, negative political ads, debates, and polls) to
exert greater influence on other people's voting decisions than on their own.
The researchers, however, did not find the predicted support for media restric-
tions.
SOURCES: W. Phillips Davison, "The Third-Person Effect in Communication," Public
Opinion Quarterly, Spring 1983; Richard Perloff, "Third-Person Effect Research, 1983-
1992: A Review and Synthesis," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 5,
1993; Dianne Rucinski and Charles T. Salmon, "The 'Other' as the Vulnerable Voter:
A Study of the Third-Person Effect in the 1988 U.S. Presidential Campaign," Interna-
tional Journal of Public Opinion Research 2, 1990.
Michael B. Salwen and Paul D. Driscoll

THOMAS, CLARENCE is the second black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hearings on his nomination concluded October 15, 1991, with the closest U.S.
Senate vote (52-48) for a U.S. Supreme Court justice in the twentieth century.