Multiple Shared Realities: The Context Sensitivity of the Saying-Is-Believing Effect

Abstract

People adjust how they talk about someone depending on whether their audience likes or dislikes that person. When they do so, they end up recalling the person more positively or negatively afterwards. This is known as the saying-is-believing effect, and it shows how tuning communication to an audience's attitudes and beliefs shapes one's memories. But people navigate a rich social world where they talk about the same person to different audiences with different attitudes. The current research shows that people's representations change as they do so, thus demonstrating the context sensitivity of the saying-is-believing effect. The typical saying-is-believing procedure—read about a person, describe her to others who like/dislike her, and then recall the original information—was adapted to fit multiple audiences with opposing attitudes. Results show that the same communicators recall the same person differently as a function of the audience context.