Biased memory retrieval in the service of shared reality with an audience: The role of cognitive accessibility

After communicators have tuned a message about a target person’s behaviors to their audience’s attitude, their recall of the target’s behaviors is often evaluatively consistent with their audience’s attitude. This audience-tuning effect on recall has been explained as resulting from the communicators’ creation of a shared reality with the audience, which helps communicators to achieve epistemic needs for confident judgments and knowledge. Drawing on the ROAR (Relevance Of A Representation) model, we argue that shared reality increases the cognitive accessibility of information consistent (vs. inconsistent) with the audience’s attitude, due to enhanced truth relevance of this information. We tested this prediction with a novel reaction-time task in three experiments employing the saying-is-believing paradigm. Faster reactions to audience-consistent (vs. audience-inconsistent) information were found for trait information but not for behavioral information. Thus, audience-congruent accessibility bias emerged at the level at which impressions and judgments of other persons are typically organized. Consistent with a shared-reality account, the audience-consistent accessibility bias was correlated with perceived shared reality about the target person and with epistemic trust in the audience. Among possible explanations, the findings are best reconciled with the view that the creation of shared reality with an audience triggers basic and "automatic" (spontaneous, low-level) cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the retrieval of audience-congruent (vs. audience-incongruent) trait information about a target person.