THE THIRD-PERSON EFFECT REVISITED

This issue of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research collects four research articles on the third-person effect and a personal memoir by W. Phillips Davison, who coined the term a dozen years back. IjfPOR was interested in the third-person effect from the start. The very first article ever to be printed in our journal was Diana Mutz's 'The Influence of Perceptions of Media Influence: Third-Person Effects and the Public Expression of Opinions', which introduced ideas and results that are taken up in this issue by Lars Willnat. In 1990 we published a much-cited study by Dianne Rucinski and Charles T. Salmon, and three years ago, IJPOR included a very helpful summary of the first ten years of 'Third-Person Effects Research' by Richard Perloff. The articles included in this issue were planned and written independently. When I saw that it was possible to collect them all in one issue, I asked Professor Davison whether he might be willing to look back on the time he introduced the concept, and to what happened since. He kindly agreed to do that and produced the note below which teaches us something about the evolution of ideas and the way social science is to tackle its questions. I am grateful that he did, and I am also grateful for the research contributions in this issue, as well as for some authors' willingness to be put off, and others' to speed up revising texts, in order that all of it could be included here. E.L.