the student's laziness. In the context of the third-person effect hypothesis, then, attribution theory explains why a person may think that he or she understands the underlying persuasive aspects of the message while others’ dispositional flaws prevent them from perceiving those same aspects. Biased optimism predicts that people tend to judge themselves as less likely than others to experience negative consequences and, conversely, that people tend to judge themselves as more likely than others to experience positive events. In the context of the third-person effect hypothesis, biased optimism explains why people judge themselves as being less likely than others to be affected by persuasion. Perceptual Component Meta-Analytic Support In a critical review and synthesis of the third-person effect hypothesis, Perloff (1999) noted that of the 45 published articles that had tested the phenomenon by 1999, all had found support for the perceptual component of the hypothesis. One year later, Paul, Salwen, and Dupagne conducted a meta-analysis of 32 empirical analyses that tested the perceptual component of the third-person effect hypothesis. Their results indicate the perceptual component of the third-person effect hypothesis received robust support (r = .50), especially compared to meta-analyses of other media effects theories. Paul, Salwen, and Dupagne (2000) also found three significant moderators of the perceptual component of the third-person effect hypothesis: (1) sampling – samples obtained from nonrandom samples yielded greater third-person effect differences than samples obtained from random samples; (2) respondent – samples obtained from student samples yielded greater third-person effect differences than samples obtained from non-student samples; and (3) message – different types of content (e.g., general media messages, pornography, television violence, commercial advertisements, political content, nonpolitical news, etc.) have differing effects on the size of the obtained third-person perceptions. Behavioral Component Support Multiple studies have found support for the behavioral component of the third-person effect hypothesis. Possibly because Davison noted that censors seldom admit to have been adversely affected by the information they proscribe, scholars who have found support for the behavioral component have generally operationalized behavior as a willingness to censor content to stop the content from having the perceived negative persuasive impact on others. Specifically, scholars have demonstrated that third-person perception predicts willingness to censor pornography, television violence, sexual and violent television in Singapore, cigarette, beer, liquor, and gambling advertising, rap music and the number of users being concurrently online on the same media website, the exact number of users having