Third-person effect (Davison, 1983)

People perceive persuasive media as affecting others more than themselves — "the ads work on the gullible, not on me." Two parts: a perceptual gap (estimated effect on others > estimated effect on self) and a behavioral consequence (people act on the gap, e.g. supporting censorship or discounting the message).

Transfer. Audiences believe manipulation lands on someone else, which means the moment content reads as targeted persuasion, the reader discounts it — for themselves while assuming it sways the crowd. For agent-produced awareness content this is the core risk: anything flagged as "AI-generated," "marketing," or "trying to sell me" trips the third-person defense and gets waved off. The defense is not persuading harder but not tripping the flag — content that reads as genuine information or a real answer never activates the "this is aimed at me" discount. This is the mechanism under the anti-mid instinct: not-obviously-persuasive is what gets past the guard.

Kin: spiral-of-silence · encoding-decoding · propaganda-model · anti-mid · models