Albert C. Gunther

Perceived Persuasive Effects of Product Commercials and Public Service Announcements Third-Person Effects in New Domains

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.

BIASED PRESS OR BIASED PUBLIC? ATTITUDES TOWARD MEDIA COVERAGE OF SOCIAL GROUPS

Mass media credibility has been defined and studied largely as an attribute of message sources. This article argues that trust in media can be better understood as a relational variable-an audience response to media content. In addition, audience assessments of credibility are commonly explained as the result of each individuals skeptical disposition, either toward mass media in particular or as a general trait. The author dissents from this view as well, proposing that distrust is more likely to be a situational response, stemming from involvement with issues and groups. Using data from a national probability sample, the hypothesis was tested by analyzing the effect of numerous independent variables on respondent ratings of newspaper and television news coverage of social groups. As hypothesized, a respondents own group identification proved to be the strongest predictor. The evidence was strengthened by replication across social groups, which provided built-in controls and demonstrated that an important part of the variance in trust of mass media news is within persons rather than between persons.

Biased Optimism and the Third-Person Effect

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.

Congenial Public, Contrary Press, and Biased Estimates of the Climate of Opinion

This field experiment focused on perceived public opinion about the use of primates in laboratory research. We used this contentious issue to examine the simultaneous effects of three hypothetical ideas-the hostile media perception, the persuasive press inference, and the projection bias-on partisan perceptions of public opinion. Our data supported the projection hypothesis but also confirmed that partisans on each side of the issue judged news articles to be biased in a disagreeable direction relative to judgments of those on the other side. The perception of relatively disagreeable media bias, in turn, influenced perceptions of public opinion. Results supported the hypothesis that people make inferences about the climate of opinion based on their reading of the news, especially the perceived slant of that news.

Why Partisans See Mass Media as Biased

Partisan groups, highly important actors in public discourse and the democratic process, appear to see mass media content as biased against their own point of view. Although this hostile media effect has been well documented in recent research, little is understood about the mechanisms that might explain it. Three processes have been proposed: (a) selective recall, in which partisans preferentially remember aspects of content hostile to their own side; (b) selective categorization, in which opposing partisans assign different valences to the same content; and (c) different standards, in which opposing partisans agree on content but see information favoring the other side as invalid or irrelevant. Using new field-experiment tests with groups of partisans who either supported (n = 87) or opposed (n = 63) the use of genetically modified foods, we found evidence of selective categorization and different standards generally. However, only selective categorization appeared to explain the hostile media effect.

Predicting Pluralistic Ignorance: The Hostile Media Perception and its Consequences

This study focused on media coverage of a controversial issue—the use of primates in laboratory research—to examine pluralistic ignorance, the potential for public misjudgment of public opinion. We hypothesized that people on both sides of the issue would find news coverage relatively disagreeable to their own point of view (the relative hostile media perception). We also expected to find that perceived public opinion would be influenced by personal opinions (the projection bias) and by perceived news slant (the persuasive press inference) and that, because of the hostile media perception, these latter two factors would push perceived public opinion in contrary directions. Data from a national probability sample (N=402) indicated support for all three hypotheses. In addition, along with an aggregate perception of unfavorable news coverage we found that people substantially overestimated public opposition to the use of primates in research. The results suggest that perceptions of the slant of press coverage can predict collective misjudgments of public opinion.

Hostile Media Perceptions: Partisan Assessments of Press and Public during the 1997 United Parcel Service Strike

This study investigated partisan perceptions of hostile bias in news coverage of the 1997 Teamsters Union strike against United Parcel Service (UPS), and the processes by which Teamster and UPS partisans formed impressions of public opinion regarding the strike. As predicted, both partisan groups perceived neutral news coverage as biased against their respective sides. However, perceptions of hostile media bias did not produce corresponding perceptions of hostile public opinion; instead, partisans appeared to rely on their personal opinions when estimating the opinions of others. Nonpartisan control-group subjects, however, did infer public opinion in part from their subjective assessments of news content. Findings suggest that level of involvement is crucial in predicting the effect that perceived media coverage of social issues will have on perceptions of public opinion regarding those issues.

The Influence of Presumed Media Influence on News About Science and Scientists

According to the authors, much of media coverage of science and scientists is explained by scientists’ beliefs regarding the impact of appearing in media on their careers. Their argument rests on recent advances in communication theory, stressing “the influence of presumed media influence,” and contributes to our understanding of why some scientists receive more media coverage than others. Combined data from a survey of scholars in an Israeli research university (n = 166) and content analysis data on the frequency of the scholars’ appearances in the media were used to test this argument. Structural equation modeling revealed that the scholars’ belief in the influence of media increased their motivation and efforts to obtain media coverage, which in turn was related to the number of their actual media appearances.

Assimilation and Contrast in a Test of the Hostile Media Effect

Recent empirical research has vividly demonstrated the hostile media effect—the tendency for individuals highly involved in a controversial issue to see media coverage of that issue as hostile to their own point of view. This type of contrast bias—along with its assimilation counterpart—is hypothesized to stem from preexisting partisan attitudes coupled with other explanatory factors, including perceived reach of the message and characteristics of the source. To test these predictions, we recruited partisan respondents who were either Native American or sympathetic to native issues. Participants (N = 152) read information, varying in apparent circulation (low, medium and high reach) and source (friendly vs. not friendly) characteristics, on the issue of genetically modified wild rice, a controversial topic for native people in the upper Midwest. Variations in reach produced a linear trend in judgments of bias in the predicted direction. However, overall evaluations tended toward assimilation rather than contrast effects, and two distinct dimensions of partisanship produced surprising and provocative results.

Testing Causal Direction in the Influence of Presumed Media Influence

According to the influence of presumed media influence hypothesis, people estimate the potential effects of media on other people and change their attitudes or behaviors as a consequence. In recent years, many studies offered some support for this idea. However, a central limitation of these studies is that all of them utilized correlational methodology and thus do not offer a valid way to infer causality. The current research examined the causal direction in the influence of presumed media influence using experimental methodology. In Study 1, the authors manipulated the perceived influence of watching pornography and measured the effects of this manipulation on support for censorship. In Study 2, perceptions regarding the influence of a news story about an expected shortage in sugar were manipulated indirectly, by manipulating the perceived exposure to the news story, and behavioral intentions resulting from the story were consequently measured. In both studies, results supported the causal direction postulated by the “presumed influence” hypothesis.