October 29, 2020: Tory Higgins

(Columbia University)

https://psychology.columbia.edu/content/e-tory-higgins

Sharing-Is-Believing

The need to establish truth and feel connected motivates creating shared realities with others by tuning our messages to match our audiences’ attitudes and beliefs. Such social tuning impacts our own later memory on the message topic. Notably, this effect occurs when message tuning creates a shared reality goal with an in-group audience but not when it serves other goals and not when the audience is an out-group unless the out-group audience has epistemic authority on the message topic. Thus, the “sharing-is-believing” effect is not just “saying-is-believing” because it depends on communicators’ treating their message as a socially shared truth, which they do for in-groups more than out-groups. In this way, creating shared reality makes an in-group stronger but can tear it apart from out-groups.