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Creating Shared Reality About Ambiguous Sexual Harassment: The Role of Stimulus Ambiguity in Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory

par Pierucci, Sabrina ;Echterhoff, Gerald;Marchal, Cynthie ;Klein, Olivier
Référence Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3, 4, page (300-306)
Publication Publié, 2014

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

By 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.