Abstract
Humans are highly motivated to achieve shared reality – common inner states (i.e., judgments, opinions, attitudes) with others about a target object. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon has been rapidly growing over the last decade, culminating in the development of a five-item self-report scale for Shared Reality about a Target (SR-T; Schmalbach, Rossignac-Milon, Keller, Higgins, and Echterhoff, unpublished). The present study aims to validate the German version of the scale. Individuals can establish shared reality either by receiving social verification (i.e., agreement or confirmation from an interaction partner) or by aligning their inner state with that of their partner. To increase the scope of the present validation, we implemented both pathways of shared-reality creation in three studies (N = 522). Study 1 employed a social judgment task, in which participants assessed ambiguous social situations and received confirming (vs. disconfirming) feedback from their partner. Studies 2 and 3 build on the saying-is-believing paradigm, in which participants align their own evaluation of the target with their partner’s judgment. Based on an evaluatively ambiguous description, participants communicated about a target person and later recalled information about the target (Study 2). To further generalize the findings, message production was omitted from the paradigm in Study 3. Overall, the five-item model of the SR-T evinced good fit and reliability. In Study 1, the SR-T reflected experimentally induced differences in commonality of judgments– even when controlling for several related state measures, such as Inclusion of Other in the Self and Need Threat. In Studies 2 and 3, the SR-T predicted participants’ evaluative recall bias, which is an established, indirect index of communicators’ shared-reality creation. This effect was stronger when participants overtly communicated with their study partner, but it still emerged without overt communication. Across all studies, correlations with related constructs support the convergent validity of the SR-T. In sum, we recommend the use of the SR-T in research on interpersonal processes and communication.
Highlights
Humans are motivated to create shared realities with other (Echterhoff et al, 2009a; Echterhoff and Higgins, 2017; Higgins, 2019), often through interpersonal communication (Echterhoff and Schmalbach, 2018)
Factor Structure Parallel analysis presented clear evidence for two factors based on the empirical eigenvalues, while the minimum average partial test (MAP) test was more ambiguous, indicating both, a two-factorial and a three-factorial solution
The principal axis factoring (PAF) loadings can be taken as further evidence for three distinct components: The items we expected to reflect experienced commonality (SR-T 1 to Shared Reality about a Target (SR-T) 7) loaded strongly on the first factor, which in turn made up the majority of all variance in all tested items
Summary
Humans are motivated to create shared realities with other (Echterhoff et al, 2009a; Echterhoff and Higgins, 2017; Higgins, 2019), often through interpersonal communication (Echterhoff and Schmalbach, 2018). Repeated experiences of shared reality lay the groundwork for relationships (Andersen and Przybylinski, 2018; Rossignac-Milon and Higgins, 2018) and can help us to develop and maintain a sense of who we are and what we want (Sullivan, 1953; Higgins, 1996). In addition to its epistemic functions of helping individuals in forming reliable impressions (Echterhoff and Higgins, 2017), shared-reality creation comes with another immense benefit for members of an “ultrasocial” species (Tomasello, 2014): When we create a shared reality with others, we connect with them, we establish or strengthen our social relationships, and fulfill our fundamental need for belonging (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)
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