¹ University of Bielefeld, Germany
² Columbia University, USA
After tuning their message to suit their audience’s attitude, communicators’ memories for the original information (a target person’s behaviors) often reflect the biased view expressed in their message – producing an audience-congruent memory bias. According to shared-reality theory, this bias occurs to the extent that communicators experience a shared reality with their audience. Consistent with this view, Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz and Groll (2007) found that communicators’ memory was biased when their audience tuning served a shared-reality goal, but not when it was motivated by alternative goals (e.g., entertaining the audience with extremely tuned messages). However, these studies did not rule out the possibility that differences in the memory bias were due to self-perception processes: Communicators infer their view of the target person from their own messages, and they are less likely to do so when they perceive their messages as strongly biased. To test this alternative account, participants in our study were assigned the role of the audience and exposed to messages from communicators in Echterhoff et al. (2007). These messages were either strongly tuned (entertainment-goal condition) or moderately tuned (shared-reality goal condition). Contrary to a self-inference account, a memory bias was found only when participants received the strongly biased messages communicated under the entertainment goal. Also, the memory bias could not be predicted by the participants’ perception of the communicator’s attitude toward the target person. These findings rule out a potentially powerful alternative to a shared-reality account of communication effects on memory.
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