The answer isn’t to abandon consumer research but to accept that people can’t accurately tell you how advertising affects them, and design your research around that reality rather than against it.

That means shifting away from questions about influence and towards questions about experience such as ‘How did the ad make you feel? What did it remind you of? What kind of person did you imagine using that product?’. These questions don’t trigger the same defensive self-perception, and they produce much more honest and useful responses.

It also means paying closer attention to what people do rather than just what they say, and this is where implicit testing becomes genuinely valuable. Implicit methods work precisely because they measure the subconscious mind. Rather than asking someone whether an ad affected them, you measure things they can’t easily control or edit such as reaction times to brand-related words, or unconscious associations. The gap between what someone says about an ad and what their body and brain are doing while they watch it can tell a lot.

This matters because the third-person effect is fundamentally a conscious phenomenon. It’s a story people tell themselves about their own resistance to influence and implicit measures don’t ask for that story.

Lastly, it means being more thoughtful about the frame you put people in. The moment you ask someone to “evaluate an advertisement,” you’ve handed them a role: critical observer, not affected consumer. That role comes pre-loaded with the conviction that they won’t be influenced. Change the frame to talk about the story, the world the ad creates, and the characters in it, and you often get a completely different quality of response.

This is all about designing research that works with human psychology rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.