Third-person effect in risk communications : the influence of presentation

The purpose of this study was to examine how people respond to the communications about risks and hazards that they may read in their daily newspaper. Specifically, it tested the third-person-effect hypothesis of Davison (1983) to see if these effects differed for straight-news and human-interest stories about risk. Davison's hypothesis states that people perceive that persuasive communications have a greater effect on other people than on themselves. Because risk may be assessed differently by experts and non-experts, the study also assessed third-person effects according to level of expertise. This research consisted of an experiment in which each of 112 adult volunteers read two stories about one of three risk issues (electromagnetic fields, pesticides, and water pollution). This was a repeated measures design in which each subject read one human-interest story and one straight-news story on one of the issues. Subjects also rated their level of expertise on a number of environmental risk issues; their self-reported expertise for the issue of the story they read was used to test whether expertise enhanced the magnitude of the effect. Support was found for third-person effects. People believed that the stories about risk would have a greater influence on others than on themselves. The human-interest story enhanced the effect on both the subject (first person) and on the subject's estimation of the effect on others (third persons). Those with greater expertise exhibited stronger third-person effects for the human-interest story, but expertise did not contribute significantly to third-person effects for the straight-news story.