The influence of group identification on collective guilt and attitudes towards reparation was examined in the context of the Belgian colonization of Congo. People should experience collective emotions to the extent that being a member of the relevant group is part of their self‐concept. Yet, the acknowledgement of ingroup responsibility for past misdeeds is particularly threatening for high identifiers and may lead to defensive reactions aimed at avoiding guilt. We therefore predicted, and found, a curvilinear effect of identification on collective guilt. Attitudes towards reparation of past wrongdoings were also assessed and yielded a linear trend: identification predicted less favourable attitudes towards reparation but this effect was marginally stronger as identification increased.
Please cite this article in press as: Pierucci, S., et al. Creating shared reality about ambiguous sexual harassment: The role of stimulus ambiguity in audience-tuning effects on memory.
a b s t r a c tBy tuning messages about ambiguous information to their audience's attitude, communicators can reduce uncertainty and form audience-congruent memories. This effect has been conceptualized as the creation of shared reality with the audience. We applied this approach to representations of ambiguous antecedents of sexual harassment and examined whether the effect depends on the event's perceived ambiguity. Participants read a testimony about a supervisor's ambiguous behaviors toward a female employee and described the behaviors to an audience who had previously evaluated him positively or negatively. We manipulated perceived ambiguity of the testimony by including or omitting information about eventual, clear-cut harassment (known vs. unknown outcome). As predicted, participants aligned their messages and memory with their audience's evaluation only in the unknown-outcome condition, where epistemic uncertainty was higher. The findings highlight the role of epistemic needs in the communicative creation of a shared reality about a ubiquitous social situation with potentially harmful outcomes.
This article investigates the role of relational motives in the saying-is-believing effect ( Higgins & Rholes, 1978 ). Building on shared reality theory, we expected this effect to be most likely when communicators were motivated to “get along” with the audience. In the current study, participants were asked to describe an ambiguous target to an audience who either liked or disliked the target. The audience had been previously evaluated as a desirable vs. undesirable communication partner. Only participants who communicated with a desirable audience tuned their messages to suit their audience’s attitude toward the target. In line with predictions, they also displayed an audience-congruent memory bias in later recall.
Para el estudio se varió el resultado final de una secuencia ambigua de conductas realizadas por una persona ficticia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Después de la secuencia ambigua de acciones, en una condición control no se producía ninguna consecuencia, en otra condición de heroísmo la persona salvaba la vida de Judíos y en otra condición de cobardía los denunciaba a la Gestapo. Los antecedentes congruentes con la conducta final se recordaron y comunicaron más una semana después. Esto sugiere una tendencia a inferir juicios extremos a partir de la conducta final del personaje, que a su vez influyen en el recuerdo en relación al nivel de previsibilidad de la conducta del personaje, e influyen en la comunicación sobre el hecho y la memoria colectiva.
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