Effects of communication on social knowledge: Sharing reality with individual versus group audiences

Higgins ET, Echterhoff G, Crespillo R, Kopietz R

Abstract

After communicators have tuned their description of another person’s behaviors to suit their audience’s attitude toward that person, their subsequent memory of the target person’s behaviors is often evaluatively biased in the direction of the audience’s attitude. Existing research, which has mainly focused on communication with individuals as the audi- ence, indicates two conditions for the occurrence of this audience-congruent memory bias: (a) the bias occurs when communicators actually produce a message for their audience, but not when they merely know their audience’s attitude and do not produce a message; and (b) the bias depends on whether communicators experience a high (vs. low) shared reality with their audience, specifically, high (vs. low) epistemic trust in their audience’s judgment. The present experiment shows that increasing epistemic trust in the audience by other means can compensate for the lack of message production. When the audience was a single individual, the bias was found only when there was actual message production. When the audience was a group (three addressees with the same attitude), the bias was found without the need for actual message production. Consistent with a shared-reality account, participants indicated higher epistemic trust in the group audience than in the individual audience.