Communicators tend to share more stereotype-consistent than stereotype-inconsistent information. The authors propose and test a situated functional model of this stereotype consistency bias: Stereotypeconsistent and inconsistent information differentially serve 2 central functions of communicationsharing information and regulating relationships; depending on the communication context, information seen to serve these different functions better is more likely communicated. Results showed that stereotype-consistent information is perceived as more socially connective but less informative than inconsistent information, and when the stereotype is perceived to be highly shared in the community, more stereotype-consistent than inconsistent information is communicated due to its greater social connectivity function. These results highlight the need to examine communication as a dynamic and situated social activity.Keywords: stereotype consistency bias, stereotype communication, informativeness, social connectivity, situated-functional modelThe stereotype consistency bias is the tendency to communicate more stereotype-consistent information than stereotypeinconsistent information in a message, and it has been well established in the stereotype communication literature (see Kashima, Klein, & Clark, 2007, for a review). In dyadic conversation, communicators spend more time discussing stereotypeconsistent information, expressing agreement with stereotypeconsistent statements, and focusing questions and discussion on stereotype-consistent information (see Ruscher, 1998, for a review). When stereotype-relevant stories are passed along a chain of communicators, a stereotype consistency bias emerges in the communicated message as stereotype-consistent information is retained and inconsistent information left out (see Kashima, et al., 2007, for a review).However, a central question remains: Why should stereotypeconsistent information have this communicative advantage over stereotype-inconsistent information? The aim of this research was to test a situated functional account of the production of a stereotype consistency bias in particular contexts. In this view, communication is a socially situated activity (Smith & Semin, 2004) Informational and Relational Functions of CommunicationCommunication serves at least two central functions, sharing novel information and the regulation of social relationships. The first central function is that of information sharing. It is widely accepted that information is transmitted to inform people about things that they do not already know, thus adding to the existing common ground. In order to ensure that their message to a communication partner is optimally informative, communicators are likely to attend to the potentially novel features of the information

There is evidence that we may be more likely to share stories about other people to the extent that they arouse emotion. If so, this emotional social talk may have important social consequences, providing the basis for many of our social beliefs and mobilising people to engage or disengage with the targets of the talk. Across three studies, we tested the situated communicability of emotional social information by examining if the ability of emotionality to increase communicability would depend on the emotion that was aroused and the identity of the audience. Study 1 showed that participants were more willing to share social anecdotes that aroused interest, surprise, disgust and happiness with an unspecified audience. Study 2 provided a behavioural replication of these findings. Study 3 showed that the communicability of emotional social talk did vary with audience identity (friend or stranger). Together, these findings suggest that emotional social events (particularly those that arouse disgust and happiness) are likely to become part of a society's social beliefs, with important consequences for the structure of social relationships. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.We spend most of our daily conversations sharing social talk-talk that conveys information about social targets. These are the stories we tell about the behaviours and traits of real or imagined individuals and groups. It seems that these stories may be more likely to convey certain kinds of social information than others: Mesoudi, Whiten, and Dunbar (2006) found that a story about a student's affair with a married professor was more likely to be retained in communication chains than a story about a student oversleeping and missing a lecture. This suggests that people may have a greater tendency to share social talk that is scintillating and scandalous or, more generally, to share social talk that arouses emotion (e.g. Rimé, Mesquita, Philippot, & Boca, 1991).If we are correct in our assertion that people are particularly likely to share emotional social information in conversation-in other words that emotional social information is particularly communicable-it means that our seemingly trivial social talk could have important social consequences. Not only is our social talk likely to form the basis of many of our social beliefs, but the emotion that it arouses is also likely to lead people to engage or disengage with the targets of social talk in positive and negative ways. As the nature and extent of these social consequences is likely to depend on the kind of emotion that is aroused by the social talk and its diffusion through a society, it is worth exploring the communicability of emotional social talk from a situated perspective, which argues that the information that people choose to communicate will depend on the social context within which that communication occurs (Clark & Kashima, 2007;Smith & Semin, 2004). Specifically, we will examine whether certain emotions increase the communicability of social information with different ...

Interpersonal communication plays a significant role in the maintenance of culturally shared stereotypes. This paper reports on two experiments in which two different stories were transmitted conversationally through communication chains. In both experiments, people tended to emphasize more stereotype consistent than stereotype inconsistent (SI) information, thus rendering the stories more confirming, rather than challenging, of the stereotypes. Although SI information sometimes attracted more attention in conversation, this did not translate into a greater likelihood of passing on SI information, thus keeping the story character's impression largely stereotypical even after a second retelling of the story.

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In a series of five experiments, we showed that the perception of temporal distance to a future event is shaped by the effort one must invest to realize the event. Studies 1a and 1b showed that when actors are faced with realizing an event by a certain deadline, more effortful events are perceived as closer in time, regardless of the objective temporal distance to the deadline. This negative relationship was reversed, however, when deadlines were absent (Study 2). Finally, priming high effort reduced perceived temporal distance to an event, whereas priming low effort increased perceived temporal distance to the event (Studies 3 and 4). The implications of these findings for models of temporal distance are discussed.