ABSTRACT
At the heart of Davison’s (1983) third-person effect hypothesis is the notion of self-other comparisons. Third-person effect researchers-Perloff (1999), for example-have described the motivation for making these self-other comparisons as a desire for self-enhancement. That is, scholars have found that people, in general, like to feel good about themselves. As social creatures, one of the ways we can engage in self-enhancement is by creating favorable comparisons with the people around us. Self-enhancement can be achieved in a number of ways. One could raise estimates of self, lower estimates of others, or combine the two, raising self-estimates while lowering estimates of others. Regardless of the process used to create self-other comparisons, a desire for self-enhancement is one of the primary motivations for engaging in the third-person effect, which ultimately leads to perceptual discrepancies.
