Third person effect or perception of other people's receptivity of the influence of mass media

Maciej Mrozowski

The article deals with the problem (quite important for the studies of mass communication) of everybody tending to overestimate the influence of mass communication on other people. This phenomenon was observed by scholars quite early, however at the beginning it was considered to be merely one of the factors intensifying, reducing or modifying the influence of the media on the receivers. It was first Davison in the article published in "Public Opinion Quarterly: (1983) who expressed the need for treating it as an important and independent element conditioning the effects of mass communicating. He named his proposal "hypothesis of the third person effect". This effect should be thus considered in the studies of media influence and in the public opinion research (especially when interpreting their results), but with the assumption that the message reception is a complex and individual process and the media receivers use them consciously and intentionally.

KEYWORDS

"Third person effect", media reception