Although direct influences of media have been the primary focus of mass communication research, recent theoretical developments have suggested powerful and important indirect effects as well. Derived from the third-person effect hypothesis and related research, but describing a broader range of phenomena, the indirect effects model proposes that people (a) perceive some effect of a message on others and then (b) react to that perception. We call this model the influence of presumed influence. The general model was tested with evaluation data from a maternal health campaign in Nepal. A key aspect of the campaign was a serial radio drama directed at clinic health workers. Results showed, however, that many women in the general population also listened to the serial. The program had no direct positive influence on this population, but we found a significant indirect influence on their attitudes and reported behaviors when mediated by their perceptions of impact on the target population of clinic health workers.Interest in modern mass communication has focused primarily on the influences-direct influences-of mass media on individuals and on society. However, developments in theoretical research over the past 2 decades suggest that mass media may exert powerful and important indirect effects as well. The indirect effects model outlined in this article is based on the idea that people perceive some influence of a communication on others and, as a result, change their own attitudes or behaviors-what one might call the influence of presumed influence. 1 Arguably the most salient instances of such indirect effects take place in an unintended audience, a group that is not the target of a message but, in a Albert C. Gunther is a professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. J. Douglas Storey is senior research and evaluation officer in the Center for Communication Programs at Johns Hopkins University. The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge comments on an earlier draft from Dale Kunkel and Shelly Strom and assistance with analysis from Stella Chih-Yun Chia.

Research has producedplentiful evidence of the third-person perception-the tendency f o r people to think others are more injluenced by mass media than they are themselves. But until now there has been scant evidence of the effects of thatperceptual bias. Consistent with past third-person eflect findings, the data in this study indicate that a substantial majority 0fU.S. adults see others as more adversely injluenced by pornography than themselves. I n addition, the results show that peoples' support for pornography restrictions parallels the discrepancy they perceive between effect on selfand effect on others.Censorship of mass media content is often justified by the argument that the message will have undesirable effects on society. Oddly though, while believing that controversial forms of expression such as defamation, fictional violence, sedition or explicit sex should be censored for the good of the public, many people have no qualms about viewing such content themselves.This curious discrepancy, often called the third-person effect (Davison, 1983), has two components. The first suggests that people are prone to a perceptual bias, leading them to estimate that a communication will have more influence on others than on themselves. The second component proposes that people may react in some way according to this estimate of larger effects on others. In other words, people tend to consider themselves less vulnerable to harmful influences, and their support for censorship may be rooted instead in their concern about effects on others.ful empirical evidence of the tendency to perceive greater media influence on others than on the self. People have exhibited this phenomenon in judgments

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.It's a sentiment we often express -"most people believe anything they see in print." But most of us do not mean to include ourselves in this observation about "most people." Susceptibility to the influence of mass media is a quality we ascribe readily to others, but rarely to ourselves.This disparity between the perceived influence of media on oneself and others has been labeled the third-person effect. The first paper detailing this hypothesis reported on four modest experiments,l all suggesting that people think such media fare as political campaigning or television commercials will influence others more than themselves.A growing body of both experimental and field research has corroborated this hypothesis. The third-person phenomenon is a robust finding. It varies among individuals, but it has appeared with compelling consistency across studies.One unanswered question is whether the tendency to estimate greater media influence on others is universal. If it is not, then contingent conditions for the third-person effect may help explain why the phenomenon occurs. Thus, in this research we set out to find conditions that would determine the presence or absence of the third-person phenomenon. Our first task was a search for common elements in previous studies.It is quickly apparent that the message context used in most thirdperson effect research does not serve an audience's self-interest. That is, Journalivm Quarterly VoL 70, No. 1 spring 1983 58-67 81993 AEJMC Albert Cunther is professor in the Department of AgrfcuJtuml]ournaJism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Paul Mundy is a communication specialist with the International Institute for RumJ Reconstruction in the Philippines. They would like to thank Woyd Bostian and Kurt Neuwirth for assistance.

A recent but robust phenomenon described in communication literature has been the third-person effect—the finding that in response to mass media messages, such as news stories and programs, people estimate themselves to be less affected than others. The present experiment asked whether this self-other pattern would characterize responses to two types of product commercials (i.e., those that did and those that did not engender emotion) and to public service announcements (PSAs). The authors were also concerned with how accurately people could estimate the effects of these types of ads on themselves and others. Results indicated that for neutral ads, people estimated themselves to be more resistant than others, but for emotional ads, people estimated themselves to be more yielding to influence than others. For PSAs, there were no differences in perceived self and other influence. In addition, judgments of persuasive influence on self and others were markedly overestimated. Perhaps most interestingly, there was both a directional (yielding vs. resistance) and a magnitudinal impact of emotion on the influence estimates.

Mass media credibility has been defined and studied largely as an attribute of message sources. This article argues that trust in media can be better understood as a relational variable-an audience response to media content. In addition, audience assessments of credibility are commonly explained as the result of each individual's skeptical disposition, either toward mass media in particular or as a general trait. The author dissents from this view as well, proposing that distrust is more likely to be a situational response, stemming from involvement with issues and groups. Using data from a national probability sample, the hypothesis was tested by analyzing the effect of numerous independent variables on respondent ratings of newspaper and television news coverage of social groups. As hypothesized, a respondent's own group identification proved to be the strongest predictor. The evidence was strengthened by replication across social groups, which provided built-in controls and demonstrated that an important part of the variance in trust of mass media news is within persons rather than between persons.

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In the context of adolescent smoking adoption, this study examined the presumed influence hypothesis, a theoretical model suggesting that smoking-related media content may have a significant indirect influence on adolescent smoking via its effect on perceived peer norms. That is, adolescents may assume that smoking-related messages in the mass media will influence the attitudes and behaviors of their peers and these perceptions in turn can influence adolescents' own smoking behaviors. Analyzing data from a sample of 818 middle school students, we found that both pro-and antismoking messages indirectly influenced smoking susceptibility through their perceived effect on peers. However, this indirect effect was significantly stronger for prosmoking messages than for antismoking messages, an outcome that most likely increases adolescents' susceptibility to cigarettes.