“I'm Not Influenced by Ads, But Not Everyone's Like Me”: The Third-Person Effect in Israeli Women's Attitude Toward TV Commercials and Their Images

What is it about?

This paper examines expressions of the third-person effect (TPE) found in an extensive feminist reception study investigating, for the first time, how Israeli women interpret images of women and femininity in TV commercials. Adopting the feminist and interpretive approach, the qualitative study was based on in-depth personal interviews with Israeli women from diverse cultural, economic, and social backgrounds. Grounded theory methodology, employed for analysis of the interviews, revealed unexpected expressions of the TPE in the women’s discourse on the potential influence of the images on different categories of “others.” The paper presents this evidence and discusses its significance in the Israeli socio-cultural context. As such, it uses different methodology in examining expressions of TPE than is traditionally used in this field.

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Why is it important?

This paper is positioned in the intersection of the feminist tradition, audience (reception) studies and Third Person Effect (TPE) research. This paper uses different (i.e., qualitative, naturalistic) methodology in examining expressions of TPE than is traditionally used in this field. As such, instead of assessing different groups of "others" which might be related to the subject under scrutiny, and instead of making a-priori assumptions about the question of social distance between individual respondents and different reference (or target) groups, this study enables to learn inductively and naturalistically about such major elements in the TPE framework. Thus, this paper provides a more nuanced look at elements within the TPE literature than the traditional quantitative methods provide - particularly, the concepts of social distance, gender based reference groups, and the context-specific nature of who will be most vulnerable to effects.

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