Shared Reality Effects of Tuning Messages to Multiple Audiences

Abstract

Our study explores how communicating with audiences who hold opposite opinions about a target person can lead to a biased recall of the target's behaviors depending on whom a shared reality is created with. By extending the standard “saying-is-believing” paradigm to the case of two audiences with opposite attitudes toward a target person, we found that communicators evaluatively tune their message to the attitude of each audience. Still, their later recall of the target's behavior is biased toward the audience's attitude only for the audience with whom they created a shared reality. Shared reality creation was manipulated by receiving feedback that, based on the communicator's message, an audience was either able (success) or unable (failure) to successfully identify the target person, with the former creating a shared reality. These results highlight the importance of shared reality creation for subsequent recall when communicating with multiple audiences on a topic.