Third-Person Effect On College Students During Patriotic Collective Action

In early 2017,due to controversy relating to the deployment of THAAD in South Korea,a movement against the Korean company Lotte began in China.This patriotic movement started online,then developed into an offline movement.During this period,traditional media and social media had an important effect on public opinion and movement organization.Based on the theory of third-person effect,this research investigates the influence of media on this patriotic movement.This research used an offline questionnaire to study how college students in Chongqing view the effect of information related to the Lotte boycott on themselves and on others.More precisely,the purpose of this survey was to determine whether college students think that the impact of such information on themselves differs from the impact on others(third-person effect cognition difference)and whether students think that this cognition difference will influence people's personal censorship or support censorship from external sources(third-person effect presumed behavior).In addition,this research also checked the influence of social distance,personal involvement,issue involvement,independent self-construction,dependent self-construction and patriotic emotion on the third-person effect cognition difference and presumed behavior.A total of 553 valid questionnaires were retrieved during the survey.The data were analyzed using a paired sample t-test,which had the following two results.First,third-person perception was found among college students,that is to say that respondents believed that information related to the Lotte boycott had a smaller impact on themselves than on others.Second,if social distance is different,then the third-person effect cognition difference is significantly different.Moreover,a hierarchical regression analysis yielded the following conclusions.First,personal involvement positively predicts cognition difference,while issue involvement negatively predicts cognition difference and positively predicts "impact on yourself" and "impact on others".Second,this research introduced the concept of self-construction from cognitive psychology and found that independent self-construction positively predicts cognition difference,while dependent self-construction does not predict cognition difference.Third,patriotic emotion negatively predicts cognition difference.Finally,as for presumed behavior,third-person effect cognition difference positively predicts personal censorship,but does not predict the behavior of supporting external censorship.