This study has three major goals. The first is to investigate
Taiwanese attitudes toward support for independent monitoring of
negative political ads and to examine whether their support for this
policy was due to the third-person effect; second, to discover
whether people's affect toward the candidates has any impact on
their support for regulation of negative commercials, and on the
third-person and first-person effects; third, to explicate whether
attack ad appeals--issue vs. image--funtion differently on people's
support for regulation and on their perceived effects of those ads
on themselves and on others.
We are a.lso interested in exammmg the question of whether
the third-person perception has an impact in the behavioral
dimension--that is, whether people will take action instead of just
holding attitudes in support of regulation of negative political
advertising. The data analyzed were collected from a cross-sectional
sample survey conducted during the campaign period of the 1996
first-ever Presidential election in Taiwan.
The results showed that people's affect toward the candidates
...
did have significant impact on the first- and third-person effect,
and on their support for regulation of negative political
commercials. However, the third-person effect had no significant
impact on either people's attitudes or behaviors in support of
independent monitoring of the negative political ads. Instead, it
was people's "perceived effects on self" that inf1uenced their
attitudes toward censorship. And, people's attitude toward the
idea of free speech also had significant impact on people's support
for regulation. In addition, the findings showed that people
exhibited a greater third-person effect for image-attack ads than
for issue-attack appeals; however, the effect of people's exposure to
image-attack ads on support for regulation of negative political ads
was not greater than the effect of exposure to issue-attack ads .
Similarly, the effect for people's exposure and attention on their
. support for independent monitoring of the negative political
advertising was not greater for TV than for than NP.
