ABSTRACT
When W. Phillips Davison developed his richly thoughtful, impressionistic piece about perceived communication effects on self and others, he saw immediately that his notion shared some of the real estate inhabited by Noelle-Neumann's ideas about the dynamics of social perceptions. Davison acknowledged this resemblance in his discussion section, “The third-person effect is probably involved in the spiral of silence….” And, referring to election campaigning on the same page, he added: “Each person may reason: I haven't been influenced by this widely publicized nonsense, but they probably have been” (Davison, 1983, p. 12).
