Biased Optimism and the Third-Person Effect

Abstract

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.