Although numerous studies have shown the third-person perception, explanation of why and how self-other perceptual gaps occur remains underdeveloped. Conceiving message-effect perceptions as a form of social judgment under varying degrees of uncertainty, this study attempts to demonstrate the responsiveness of the perceptual gap to information on message effectiveness and to explicate the uncertainty-reduction interpretation of social distance corollary. Analyzing data from a survey and an experiment, this study finds that credible information on overall message ineffectiveness leads to reductions in estimated effects of the messages on both self and various others and in self-other perceptual gaps when the other is most distant from self. Consistent with the uncertainty reduction argument, the self-other perceptual gaps are related to perceived similarity of the others and vary in response to labels of the others that cue different degrees of similarity with self. Directions for future studies and practical implications are discussed.My original evaluation of the phenomenon had been quite wrong: the thirdperson effect was not a manifestation of a single psychological tendency, but is a 143
This paper tackles, in two studies, one specific aspect of the perceptual processes in public opinion: how people assess the effects of media reports of opinion polls. There are several reasons to address this question empirically. First, opinion polls, as a mass feedback mechanism (Mutz, ), influence individuals' perceptions of mass opinion or the opinion of the generalized other (Fields & Schuman, ; Glynn, Ostman, & McDonald, ; Mutz, ). However, how news reports are perceived as having effects received research attention only recently (e.g., de Vreese & Semetko, ). Second, reporting opinion polls has become a steady feature of political coverage of the news media (Frankovic, ; Patterson, ), making poll reports a distinct type of media message. Political actors often take actions (e.g. to spin poll results) predicated on perceived effects of such messages (Mutz, ). As a result, how individuals perceive the effects of news reports of polls constitutes part of the overall influence of polls in public opinion processes. Third, there is evidence of widespread public ambivalence toward the proliferation of polls in news coverage of politics (de Vreese & Semetko, ; Lavrakas, Holley, & Miller, ), which may lead to not only biased estimates of presumed influence of opinion poll reports (Gunther & Storey, ) but also support for restriction of opinion poll reports (de Vreese & Semetko, ; Milavsky, Swift, Roper, Salant, & Abrams, ). We make a sharp conceptual distinction between two perceptual effects in public opinion processes: perceptions of mass opinion as an outcome of exposure to poll reports and perceived effects of such opinion poll reports as a form of media message. The former has been examined in various empirical studies and shown to have important political consequences. 1 This paper takes up the latter to demonstrate that media reports of polls invoke a self-other gap in perceived effects similar to that invoked by other forms of media messages with presumed undesirable social influences. This research note was first submitted to IJPOR January , . The final version was received May , 5. 1 Studies have examined many effects of opinion polls on mass opinions and the political consequences. These effects are represented by labels such as bandwagon effect, underdog effect, hostile reaction, spiral of silence, hostile media, political activation, impersonal influence, and so on. Readers who wish to explore them are directed to representative writings on these topics (e.g. Ceci & Kain, ;
The professional role and responsibilities for sports journalists have evolved to now include using social media. In this study, we explore how male and female print sports journalists use Twitter to communicate with their followers about sports. Relying on previous research showing disparities in sports coverage and gender as well as assertive and affiliative language theory, we employ a content analysis of tweets from 57 sports journalists ( N = 4,897). We find that male and female sports journalists tweet at statistically the same rate, but male sports journalists are more likely to tweet about sports than female sports journalists, less likely to tweet about women sports and athletes, and more likely to use assertive language in their tweets. Findings are discussed with suggestions for future research.
This study examines patterns of local newspaper crime coverage in terms of the community structure model, which is derived from the research of Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien. A total of 32 metropolitan statistical areas and primary metropolitan statistical areas, classified into four different categories of community according to the structural characteristics of structural pluralism and ethnic diversity, were selected for inclusion in this study. Crime news reports from the major newspaper of each selected community were analyzed based on the types of crimes (violent crime vs. property crime). These data were then compared to FBI crime statistics. In terms of the results, ethnic diversity was found to be a more important factor than structural pluralism in explaining the high proportion of violent crime coverage and the lesser amount of reportage of property crimes, as well as the discrepancies between the newspaper crime reports and the FBI crime statistics.
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