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Biased Optimism and the Third-Person Effect
Abstract
While the third-person effect has proved to be a persistent and robust finding, most research on this phenomenon has employed media stimuli with potentially harmful consequences for its audience. We hypothesized that underlying the third-person phenomenon is a human tendency to see the world through optimistic or self-serving lenses. Such an optimistic bias predicts that people will estimate greater media effects on others than on themselves for messages with harmful outcomes, but no difference in effect for beneficial messages.
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Citations
Cited by
The Influence of Presumed Influence
Gunther, A. C., & Storey, J. D. (2003) · Journal of Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2003.tb02586.x · Cited by 522
Self-citationOverrating the X-Rating: The Third-Person Perception and Support for Censorship of Pornography
Gunther, A. C. (1995) · Journal of Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1995.tb00712.x · Cited by 422
Self-citationThird person effects of fake news: Fake news regulation and media literacy interventions
Jang, S. M., & Kim, J. K. (2018) · Computers in Human Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.034 · Cited by 414
The Third Person Effect: A Critical Review and Synthesis
Perloff, R. M. (1999) · Media Psychology · doi:10.1207/s1532785xmep0104_4 · Cited by 403
Nan, X., & Zhao, X. (2016) · Journal of Health Communication · doi:10.1080/10810730.2015.1023958 · Cited by 30
Metadata
- Authors
- Gunther, A. C., & Mundy, P.
- Venue
- Journalism Quarterly
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1993-03
- Volume
- 70
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 58-67
- ISSN
- 0196-3031 (ISSN-L)
- 0022-5533
- OpenAlex
- W2016122641
- Cited by
- 316
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 87.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Gunther, A. C., & Mundy, P. (1993). Biased Optimism and the Third-Person Effect. Journalism Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909307000107
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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
