Overrating the X-Rating: The Third-Person Perception and Support for Censorship of Pornography

Abstract

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

Right about others, wrong about ourselves? Actual and perceived self‐other differences in resistance to persuasion

“…This creates the illusion that others' attitudes have changed, but not their own. Overall, this pattern of results contrasts with the idea that people are accurate about their own degree of attitude change, and inaccurate about others' (Gunther, 1991(Gunther, , 1995Gunther & Thorson, 1992;McLeod et al, 1997). Here, participants more closely predicted others' attitude change than their own.…”

“…In Study 1, we consistently measured 'self' attitudes prior to 'other' attitudes in the initial phase, and did not vary the ordering of the questions; previous research suggests that question order in TPE studies does not influence responses (see Gunther, 1995;Price & Tewksbury, 1996;Tiedge, Silverblatt, Havice & Rosenfeld, 1991, but see Dupagne et al, 1999. Also, see footnote 2.…”

Online Gambling Advertising and the Third-Person Effect

“…The TPE has been widely analysed over the past 30 years. A large number of scholarly works have found support for the perceptual component of the TPE in a great variety of contexts, such as pornography (Gunther, 1995), controversial advertising (Shah, Faber and Youn, 1999), political advertising (Meirick, 2004), and online gaming (Zhong, 2009). TPE usually emerges in the context of undesirable messages, and vanishes (Gunther and Mundy, 1993), or reverses (the so-called First-Person Effect) when the message is perceived as desirable (Eveland and McLeod, 1999).…”

“…In this sense, studies of the TPE behavioural component have mainly focused on the support to ban or censor controversial content, such as explicit sexual content (Gunther, 1995), misogynistic songs (McLeod et al, 1997), unfair and misleading political messages (Hoffner and Rehkoff, 2011), and trash talk-shows (GuerreroSolé et al, 2014). Even though censorship is associated with authoritarian societies, citizens in democratic societies express their willingness to censor specific controversial media content if it is perceived as socially harmful (McLeod et al, 2001).…”

Henriksen and Flora (1999) Revisited—A Literature Review on Third-Person Effects and Children/Adolescents

“…With the support of Rucinski and Salmon (1990) and Gunther (1995), Xu and Gonzenbach (2008, p. 367) argued that the most commonly researched TPE behavioral aspects are consequences in the form of support for censorship. In resemblance with what has been showed in this review, the most prominent body of research on consequences has also been within questions of support for censorship.…”