Columbia University, USA
It has long been an axiom in social psychology that individuals rely on other people for their understanding of the world (e.g., Sherif, 1935; Festinger, 1950; Hardin & Higgins, 1996). The “Communication Game” (Higgins & Rholes, 1978) is an experimental paradigm that has been used to demonstrate that social verification can yield lingering, shared memories (e.g., Echterhoff, Higgins, & Groll, 2005). We hypothesized that the memory effects of receiving social verification from another person go beyond the effects of mere collaboration. Moreover, we hypothesized that such socially constructed memories can mediate behavioral effects like social coordination and trusting behavior. In addition to basic social-verification conditions, separate conditions were administered where participants were able to collaborate with a team member without a chance to verify each others’ views. The successful social verification group showed significantly stronger memory effects (saying-is-believing tendency) than any of the other three groups: failed social verification, successful mere collaboration, and failed mere collaboration. In an unrelated-studies paradigm, participants in the successful social verification group later demonstrated significantly more trust toward the other person and three other individuals in a coordination situation with actual monetary payoffs (weak link game) than did any other of the groups. We discuss the implications of the results for viewing shared memory establishment as a basic mechanism for social coordination, and consider components in a trust taxonomy.
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