The Role of Uncertainty for Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory

Jens H. Hellmann¹ ², Gerald Echterhoff¹, René Kopietz¹ & Amina Memon²
1 University of Bielefeld, Germany
2 University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Communicators often modify their messages about a topic toward their addressee’s attitude on this issue. This may lead to subsequent biased retellings of the original events. These audience-tuning effects could often be replicated over the last three decades with the Communication Game (e.g., Higgins, 1992). However, so far psychological researchers have focused on verbal material used to describe a target person. In this study we tried to investigate audience-tuning effects on memory in a more ecologically valid context. For the first time, participants watched a video that depicted ambiguous behaviours of a target person (instead of reading an essay). We were able to replicate audience-tuning effects for both memory and impression: Participants liked the target person more and remembered him in a positively biased way, after tuning a message to an audience who liked (vs. disliked) the target person and vice versa. Importantly, this was only the case after participants received a negative (vs. positive) feedback regarding their capability to form a reliable impression about other people. In sum, these results support the notion that high uncertainty about the communication topic is a necessary precondition for audiencetuning effects on memory (Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz & Groll, in press).