Perceived Persuasive Effects of Product Commercials and Public Service Announcements

Abstract

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.

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

“…However, one important limitation of this methodology is that measures of own and others' persuasibility are obtained without reference to an objective measure of actual influence (Gunther, 1991;Gunther & Thorson, 1992). It is therefore impossible to determine the degree to which perceptions of one's own persuasibility, and perceptions of others', are in error.…”

“…This enabled us to identify whether participants' perceptions of others were accurate with confidence. This strategy has been successfully applied to other self-serving biases (e.g., Krueger & Dunning, 1999), and contrasts with other studies that have asked participants to compare themselves to broader, more remote groups such as 'other university students' for which no properly sampled empirical norm is available (e.g., Cohen et al, 1988, Gunther, 1991Gunther & Thorson, 1992).…”

“…Only a small number of studies have investigated the accuracy issue, and none have used a methodology akin to the method we have proposed in this paper (see Cohen et al, 1988;Gunther, 1991;Gunther & Thorson, 1992). To illustrate the method used in previous studies, Gunther (1991) presented an experimental group with a negative newspaper article Underestimating media influence on the self 7 about an American police chief.…”

“…To assess the accuracy of perceived attitude change for the self and others, Gunther compared the rated degree of attitude change to the index of actual attitude change. Other studies examining the accuracy issue (Cohen et al, 1988;Gunther & Thorson, 1992) used a very similar method to Gunther (1991), comparing an index of perceived attitude change with a different index of actual attitude change. Cohen et al (1988) also did not report anchor points.…”

“…Cohen et al (1988) also did not report anchor points. However, Gunther and Thorson (1992) indicated that pre-test attitude measures were seven-point scales anchored by descriptive terms including "good/bad, dislike/like, and positive/negative" (p.…”