A unidade de investigação William James Center for Research do ISPA - Instituto Universitário, irá realizar no próximo dia 27 de Outubro um Research Seminar intitulado Sharing is Believing. O mesmo será da responsabilidade do professor E. Tory Higgins, professor da Columbia University in the City of New York.

Sharing is Believing

The motive to create a shared reality with others is one of the most important goals of communication. Other people’s behaviors are often evaluatively ambiguous, challenging perceivers’ sense of what is true. By sharing reality through communication, people can reduce their epistemic uncertainty. One specific mechanism used by communicators to create a shared reality and reduce uncertainty is to tune their messages about a person or group to suit their audience’s attitude. This talk will describe research that directly examined how the need to establish "truth" and the need to feel connected motivates message tuning and creates a shared reality, as revealed in communicators’ later remembering what they said rather than what they observed (the “saying-is-believing” effect).  The studies show that the saying-is-believing effect occurs when message tuning serves social sharing goals with in-group members but not when it serves other goals (e.g., an ulterior goal of getting the audience to reward you) and not when the audience is an out-group with whom communicators do not want to share reality—despite the amount of message tuning being as great or even greater in these other non-shared-reality conditions. These findings demonstrate that “sharing is believing” depends on communicators’ treating their message as a socially shared truth.