Perceived Persuasive Effects of Product Commercials and Public Service Announcements

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.