Abstract
This research investigated how interpersonal communication with a large audience can influence communicators’ attitudes. Research on the saying-is-believing effect has shown that when an individual’s attitude is perceived in advance by a communicator, the communicator tunes the message to the person, which biases the communicator’s attitude toward the person’s attitude. In this study, we examined the conditions under which audience tuning and attitude bias can occur with audiences containing more than one individual. We manipulated communicators’ perceived group entity for a large audience and the audience’s prior attitudinal valence and measured the audience’s epistemic trust. The results showed that communicators tuned their messages to the audience’s attitude when they perceived group entitativity and epistemic trust. Furthermore, tuning the message to the audience was found to bias communicators’ subsequent impressions of the topic in a direction closer to the audience’s attitude. These results suggest that perceiving a large audience as a group influences the subsequent impressions of electronic word-of-mouth product or service communicators.
Highlights
People share their experiences with others through social networking services by posting on Internet forums, websites, or blogs
This study proposed that perception of a consensual viewpoint in a large audience and trust in their understanding of the message should be related to an expectation of successfully establishing a shared reality, which could affect audience tuning
We proposed that expectations of establishing shared reality moderate audience tuning, and such expectations are induced by perceiving entitativity and epistemic trust in the audience
Summary
People share their experiences with others through social networking services by posting on Internet forums, websites, or blogs. People frequently use microblogging platforms (e.g., Twitter) to share their everyday happenings with networked others (e.g., followers). People use electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in the form of online shopping website reviews (e.g., Amazon) to share their experiences with a product or service with unknown others (e.g., Amazon users). Such interpersonal communication requires at least two parties, a communicator and an audience, most previous research has focused on the influence that posting and sharing has on the audience, such as information spreading and decision-making. Little attention has been paid to how communicators’ shared experiences influence their attitudes
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