undesirable messages, such as violent and hateful messages, yield a greater third-person effect. On the other hand, when messages are perceived as desirable, people are not so likely to exhibit a third-person effect. According to Perloff (2009), the first-person effect, or reversed third-person effect, is more common for desirable messages and seems to emerge when agreement with the message reflects positively on the self and to some degree when the message touches on topics that are congruent with the orientation of groups with which individuals identify. According to the self-enhancement view, if the third-person effect is driven by a desire to preserve self-esteem, people should be willing to acknowledge effects for communications that are regarded as socially desirable, healthy, or otherwise good for the self. Undergraduates perceived that others will be more influenced than themselves by cigarette ads but they will be more affected by anti-tobacco and drunk-driving PSAs. Another factor that influences the magnitude of the third-person effect is perceived social distance between self and comparison others. In the “social distance corollary,” the disparity of self and other is increased as perceived distance between self and comparison others is increased. Assumed in social distance, is that people are more likely to think that someone will have a similar response to themselves if they share characteristics such as where they live, political affiliations and age. Although social distance is not a necessary condition for the third-person effect to occur, increasing the social distance makes the third-person effect larger. In their meta-analysis, Andsager and White (2007) concluded that “Research consistently finds that others who are anchored to self as a point of reference are perceived to be less influenced by persuasive messages than are others who are not defined and, therefore, not anchored to any point of reference at all” (p. 92). Psychological Underpinnings Perloff notes that the majority of third-person effect studies attribute the psychological underpinnings of the effect to either attribution theory or biased optimism. Attribution theory predicts that actors tend to attribute their actions to situational factors while observers tend to attribute the same actions to dispositional factors. For example, attribution theory predicts that a student who turns in a late assignment may explain to the professor that the tardiness is uncharacteristic and due to a situational factor like an unusual computer problem while the professor might believe the tardiness was due instead to a dispositional factor like