Today, the U.S. Congress reacted to the publication of a bulletin from the french Ministry of Justice. This bulletin, which has already been the object of polemical discussions in recent days, instructs prosecutors and judges of courts of appeal to consider certain religious practices, such as fasting, as means of psychological subjection.

In a letter to Prime Minister Francois Fillon dated October 28, co-signed by the presidents of House International Religious Freedom Caucus, the members of U.S. Congress, express their worries: "We are worried because there is no chance of real justice for these movements (religious minority) and this appears as a direct intervention of the executive power to influence and direct the decisions of judges in criminal cases."

Richard M. Perloff in 1993 and Bryant Paul in 2000 reviewed all the studies since researcher W. Phillips Davison first coined the term "third person effect" in 1983. Davison noticed some people saw certain messages in the media as a call to action, not because of what was being said, but because of who might hear it. He pointed to the third person effect as the source of outrage from religious leaders over "heretical propaganda" and the ire of political rulers over some speech out of a "fear of dissent." Furthermore, Davison saw such censorship as arising out of a belief that some messages might harm "more impressionable minds." Perloff and Paul found that the third person effect is magnified when you already have a negative opinion of the source, or if you personally think the message is about something you aren't interested in. In all, their meta-analysis showed the majority of people believe they aren't like the majority of people.

You don't want to believe you can be persuaded, and one way of maintaining this belief is to assume that all the persuasion flying through the air must be landing on other targets. Otherwise, how could it be successful? ...

When you watch your preferred news channel or read your favorite newspaper or blog, you tend to believe you are an independent thinker. ...On the other side of the television, networks and producers design programming based on statistics and ratings, on demographic analysis that cuts through the third person effect so you can keep on believing you aren't the kind of person who watches the shows you watch. You tend to think that you are not like the people who live in your town, got to your school, work at your business, and so on. You are unique. You dance to the beat of a different drummer. You fail to realize just by living in your town, attending your school, and working at your job, you ARE the kind of person who would do those things. You you weren't, you would be doing something else. ...

The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent and more skilled than you are. Research into the self-serving bias shows subjects tend to rate themselves as more skilled than their coworkers, better drivers than the average person, more attractive ... {etc} It follows, then, that most people would believe that they were less gullible than the majority. ...

When the Third Person Effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if those messages should be censored too.

Persuasion: The Third-Person Effect

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?

Persuasive experiments

So pervasive is this feeling that only 'other' people are influenced by things like adverts that many studies have explored the idea, with an initial surge in the 1980s and 90s. Psychologists wanted to see how much people thought they were influenced by persuasive messages like adverts and compare it with actual attitude changes, if any.

Typically these studies first got participants to watch an advert, read a newspaper article or other medium containing a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much it had influenced them and how much it might influence other people. Since the experimenters measured actual persuasion and knew from previous research how influential the messages were, they could compare people's guesses with reality.

What they found, in study after study, was that participants thought others would be influenced by the message, but that they themselves would remain unaffected. When psychologists looked at the results, though, it was clear that participants were just as influenced as other people. This was dubbed the 'third-person effect'.

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.

Take back control

The third-person effect is unusual because it goes against the general finding that we overestimate other people's similarity to ourselves.

This is what psychologists call the false consensus effect: we tend to assume that others hold more similar opinions and have more similar attributes and personalities to ourselves than they really do.

The third-person effect, though, goes in the other direction. When it comes to influence, instead of thinking other people are similar to us, we think they're different. There are two facets of human nature that support this exception:

* Illusion of invulnerability. People prefer to believe that they are, on average, less vulnerable than others to negative influences, like unwanted persuasion attempts. We all want to protect our sense of control over our lives. One way we do that is to assume that ads only work on other people.

* Poor self-knowledge. Although it's an unpalatable idea, we often don't know what's really going on in our own minds. Not only does this make scientific psychology a tricky enterprise, it also means that many of our intuitions about the way our own minds work are scrambled and subject to biases like the illusion of invulnerability. The effect of persuasive messages is a good example of this.

People often react to this sort of research by saying it's disheartening, which it is. It's not a happy thought that we don't know how easily we are influenced because we don't really know what's going on in our own minds.

However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending influence attempts don't work is likely to increase our vulnerability. On the other hand, if we acknowledging our lack of insight into our own thought processes, we can raise our defences against the power of advertising and messages of influence, and take back control for ourselves.

W. Phillips Davison, The Third-Person Effect in Communication

A person exposed to a persuasive communication in the mass media sees this as having a greater effect on others than on himself or herself. Each individual reasons: "I will not be influenced, but they (the third persons) may well be persuaded." In some cases, a communication leads to action not because of its impact on those to whom it is ostensibly directed, but because others (third persons) think that it will have an impact on its audience. Four small experiments that tend to support this hypothesis are presented, and its complementary relationship to a number of concepts in the social sciences is noted. The third-person effect may help to explain various aspects of social behavior, including the fear of heretical propaganda by religious leaders and the fear of dissent by political rulers. It appears to be related to the phenomenon of censorship in general: the censor never admits to being influenced; it is others with "more impressionable minds" who will be affected.