How communication goals determine when audience tuning biases memory.
After tuning their message to suit their audience's attitude, communicators' own memories for the original information (e.g., a target person's behaviors) often reflect the biased view expressed in their message--producing an audience-congruent memory bias. Exploring the motivational circumstances of message production, the authors investigated whether this bias depends on the goals driving audience tuning. In 4 experiments, the memory bias was found to a greater extent when audience tuning served the creation of a shared reality than when it served alternative, nonshared reality goals (being polite toward a stigmatized-group audience; obtaining incentives; being entertaining; complying with a blatant demand). In addition, the authors found that these effects were mediated by the epistemic trust in the audience-congruent view but not by the rehearsal or accurate retrieval of the original input information, the ability to discriminate between the original and the message information, or a contrast away from extremely tuned messages. The central role of epistemic trust, a measure of the communicators' experience of shared reality, was supported in meta-analyses across the experiments.
Echterhoff
Gerald
G
Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany. gerald.echterhoff@uni-bielefeld.de
Higgins
E Tory
ET
Kopietz
René
R
Groll
Stephan
S
D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D011584:Psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012931:Social Environment