Topic and Objectives of the Meeting

In recent years, interest in the joint or socially shared nature of individuals’ perceptions and representations has soared in experimental social psychology (e.g., Forgas & Williams, 2001; Hardin & Higgins, 1996) and other closely related fields, such as memory (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003; Hirst & Manier, 2002; Weldon, 2001), cognition (Barsalou et al., 2003; Prinz, 2002; Sebanz, Bekkering & Knoblich, 2006; Smith & Semin, 2004), psycholinguistics (Liberman & Whalen, 2000; Pickering & Garrod, 2004), sociology (Thompson & Fine, 1999), communication (Higgins & Semin, 2001), developmental psychology (Meltzoff & Decety, 2003), and social neuroscience (e.g., Cacioppo & Berntson, 2004; Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti, 2003). Across these diverse subdomains, there is an increasing corpus of evidence on how people are influenced by interaction and communication with others or by the broader social context when they form their own views and beliefs about the world and themselves, and when they remember past experien s. Clearly, these interests resonate with accounts emphasizing the role of interpersonal processes in how people form and construe their perceptions, beliefs, judgments, and impressions that have been foundational themes throughout the history of social psychology (e.g., Asch, 1952; Festinger, 1950; Heider, 1958; Mead, 1934; Moscovici, 1981; Schachter, 1959; Sherif, 1936). The recent approaches can be seen as continuing these traditional trajectories, with new methodologies, novel conceptual tools, and discipline-specific goals. The aim of the planned small group meeting is to bring together senior scientists, early career researchers, and doctoral students with curiosity and expertise in this field to exchange ideas and to work towards an integrated outlook from a primarily social-psychological perspective. Contributions to the meeting shall focus on shared processes in social cognition (e.g., forming beliefs and judgments about others and oneself; construing information in communication) and on the shared aracter of memory and remembering. We will further distinguish between shared representations as (a) dependent and (b) independent variables, with attention to questions such as: (a) How are joint representations formed and attained on-line (as in joint, physically co-present encoding or retrieval; Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2006; Gabbert et al., 2003) or off-line (as in priming with social stimuli)? And, what are the factors (e.g., basic cognitive or neural mechanisms; affiliative or self-serving motives; linguistic tools; conversational relevance; existing stereotypes) that shape the formation of these shared representations? (b) What are the effects (the benefits, uses, functions) of joint representations? For example, the joint nature of representations can foster interpersonal trust, empathy, and liking (Semin, 2000), facilitate smooth conversation between interlocutors (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), allow the coordination of action across individuals, guide the abstraction level of information in conversation lark & Semin, 2006), or grant epistemic confidence or closure (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Groll, 2005; Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz, & Groll, in press; Kruglanski, Pierro, Manetti, & De Grada, 2006). The meeting is designed to build bridges across the various research domains and reveal new lines of enquiry which dovetail social-psychological research with approaches in the other areas, and allow for collaborations across these new connections. It is expected that the planned presentations and discussions will both initiate new collaborations and strengthen incipient collaborations between participants, especially those who are members of the EAESP, with reference to theory, methodology, and application.

Group members’ reactions toward defection: the role of shared reality and epistemic motivation.

Lucia Mannetti*, Antonio Pierro*, Eraldo De Grada*, John Levine**, & Arie Kruglanski***
*University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
**University of Pittsburgh, USA
***University of Maryland, USA

The present studies, that were stimulated by the theoretical analysis of group reactions to loyalty and disloyalty (Levine & Moreland, 2002), investigated how groups respond to an interesting form of disloyalty, namely defection, which involves leaving one’s current group to join another group. Our three studies (having as participants members of Young Catholic Association, study 1; players of Juvenile Volleyball teams, study 2; and members of Scout groups, study 3) focus on the threat that defectors pose to the group’s sense of shared reality. From this perspective, defectors elicit negative reactions because they jeopardize the group’s sense of shared reality. If this is true, the strength of the group’s negative reaction to defectors should vary positively with the defectors’ threat to shared reality. Furthermore, members with higher Need for Cognitive Closure should perceive more strongly and negatively the threat to shared reality since defection, whatever the defector’s motives represents a change of the status quo and, for high NCC people, a potential threat to order and predictability of the world. Results of all the studies show that: a) high confidence in shared reality appears to reduce the threatening potential of defection episodes; b) high Need for closure appears to induce a more negative reaction toward defection; and c) the relationship between NCC and negative reaction toward defection is moderated by confidence in shared reality: when such a confidence is low high NCC members react more negatively to defection.

Attitude Alignment as a Function of Construal

Alison Ledgerwood & Yaacov Trope
New York University, USA

Research suggests both that attitudes can be remarkably stable across situations, and that they often fluctuate depending on the immediate social context. The present perspective seeks to integrate these findings by using construal level and shared reality theories to inform our understanding of attitudes as functional summaries of socially-shared information. We reasoned that low-level construals of an attitude object should elicit local evaluative summaries, tuned to a particular, shared social context, whereas high-level construals should elicit global summaries, abstracted across multiple contexts. Attitude alignment (at least in temporary social relationships) should therefore occur primarily when the attitude object is construed at a low level. In Study 1, temporal distance was used to manipulate construal. Participants expected to interact with a partner who was favorable or unfavorable toward deporting illegal immigrants, and reported voting preferences for a deportation policy that would be implemented next week or next year. Whereas participants’ attitudes were significantly influenced by partner attitudes for the near-future policy, there was no alignment effect in the distant-future condition. Study 2 zeroed in on our hypothesized process by manipulating construal level directly. Results revealed that participants in a low-level mindset condition aligned their attitudes toward euthanasia with their partner’s attitudes, whereas those in a high-level mindset condition did not. Implications are discussed for the impact of construal-relevant variables (e.g., social distance, linguistic abstraction) on attitude alignment, and a broader theoretical perspective is proposed, in which attitudes are viewed as evaluative summaries that can draw from temporary or ongoing shared realities.

How Communication Goals Determine When Audience Tuning Biases Memory: Shared Reality or Self-Inference Processes?

René Kopietz¹, Gerald Echterhoff¹, E. Tory Higgins², & Karsten Klein²
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.

When Belief Sharing is Questioned: Impact of Low Consensus Information on Judgments About Social Groups

Miroslaw Kofta, Wladyslaw Narkiewicz-Jodko, & Dorota Szelag
Center for Research on Prejudice, Psychology Faculty
Warsaw University, Poland

Perception of belief as shared results in consensual validation (a belief’s experiential status moves from a "subjective feeling" to a “true, objective statement about reality”). Hence, questioning belief’ consensuality should undermine the belief and decrease its impact on social judgment. We hypothesize that this theory holds to the extent that belief is relatively weak, uninvolving, and not central to person’s group identity. When the opposite is true, questioning its consensuality is expected to produce the opposite (paradoxical) effects. Why? In the latter case, low consensus information presumably threatens the conception of the self as a "good” (prototypical) member of the group resulting in activation of whatever strong beliefs accessed by the person in a given moment. We examined how informing participants that their stereotypes are not shared in the group affects social judgment. It appeared that, when judgments were relatively uninvolving and unrelated to participants’ social identity, this treatment weakened stereotypical beliefs on explicit and implicit levels and undermined confidence in their validity (classical effect). However, when we moved to strong stereotypical beliefs (males’ conservative expectations about women’ social roles), the pattern changed substantially. Under group identity primed, low consensus information increased an impact of stereotypical beliefs on judgment (paradoxical effect). Of interest, under personal identity primed, this effect was replaced by the classical effect. This pattern shows that paradoxical increase of a belief strength after the low consensus message is, indeed, specifically related to social identity. In conclusion, questioning belief sharing may produce opposite effects on a momentary intensity of social beliefs. When low consensus information is processed in the cold manner, belief weakening is to be expected. However, when low consensus information is processed in the hot manner (as inconsistent with belief strong and relevant to person’s group identity), belief strengthening seems more likely.

Effects of social verification (but not of collaboration) on memory and social coordination

Per H. Hedberg & E. Tory Higgins
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.

Shared Reality in Communication

Gerald Echterhoff
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.

Cognitive Accessibility of the O.J. Simpson Trial Regulates Interpersonal, Inter-Ethnic Relationships

Terri D. Conley
University of Missouri, USA

Curtis. D. Hardin
Brooklyn College, USA

Shared reality theory postulates that interpersonal relationships are regulated by the degree to which participants share experiences and attitudes (Hardin & Conley, 2001; Hardin & Higgins, 1996). We were interested in whether these shared beliefs can promote positive interpersonal relationships. This postulate was tested by examining the consequences of activating thought about the O.J. Simpson murder trial on actual interactions among Blacks and Whites at three time points: directly following the trial, five years after the trial, and ten years after the trial. In three experiments, mixed-ethnicity and same-ethnicity dyads participated in cooperative problem-solving tasks after being reminded of the Simpson trial. Because the trial represents a dimension of belief discrepancy between Blacks and Whites but a dimension of shared beliefs among Whites and among Blacks, we hypothesized that activating the trial would affect interpersonal interactions differently depending upon the ethnic composition of participant pairs. As predicted, activating the Simpson trial caused the quality of interpersonal perceptions and behaviors to decrease for mixed-ethnicity dyads, but increase for same-ethnicity dyads. The latter finding concerning the increased positive perceptions among same ethnicity dyads is uniquely predicted by shared reality. These findings indicate that shared reality promotes the development of positive relationships. The findings are strongly consistent with shared reality theory but only weakly, if at all, supportive of other alternatives, such as social identity theory, a similarity-breeds-liking perspective, or a stereotyping perspective.