University of Bielefeld, Germany
E. Tory Higgins
Columbia University, USA
A key topic of social psychology is the human tendency to share inner states, such as beliefs, judgments, or, more generally, representations of the world. The power of social sharing derives from its potential to satisfy fundamental motives, in particular relational needs (feeling connected with others) and epistemic needs (achieving a reliable understanding of the world). Shared reality emerges as the product of the motivated sharing of inner states. The talk focuses on communication as a pathway of creating a shared reality and on the epistemic functions of sharing. Research investigating communication effects in the saying-is-believing paradigm has shown that tuning messages to the audience’s attitude can shape the communicators’ own representations of and memory for the message referent (here, a target person). We review a body of recent studies demonstrating that this effect occurs to the extent that communicators achieve a sense of shared reality about the referent with their audience. The evidence suggests that the effect depends on whether communicators are motivated to create a shared reality through audience tuning, whether they accept the audience as an appropriate co-constructor of reality, whether they experience their communication as successful, and whether they connect to the audience’s inner state about the referent. The impact of manipulations of shared reality is typically found to be mediated by the communicators’ epistemic trust in the audience and their audience-congruent message. We discuss pathways of social sharing other than communication and differences between shared reality and related concepts.
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