Third-Person Effect

American sociologist W. Phillips Davison first articulated the hypothesis in a 1983 article in Public Opinion Quarterly, predicting that people overestimate media's influence on others while underestimating its effect on themselves. Davison's interest began in 1949 or 1950 when he learned of Japan's failed World War II propaganda targeting Black American soldiers at Iwo Jima. Later, interviewing West German journalists, he noticed a recurring pattern: they claimed editorials influenced "ordinary readers" but not "people like you and me"—the asymmetry that became the third-person effect.