Pretensive Shared Reality

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We draw on multiple examples, but focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) - and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) - as a primary example of such play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term ‘pretensive shared reality'; Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. Our conception links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities - which underpin many forms of imaginative culture - are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.

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.

The Audience-Tuning Effect of Negative Stereotypes in Communication

Shared reality theory states that people allow others to influence their own judgments and behaviors when a shared reality is achieved (Hardin and Higgins, 1996; Echterhoff et al., 2009a). Based on this theory, this research has explored how audience attitude affects the communicator’s memory of negative stereotype-related information in interpersonal communication. Two experiments have been conducted, using the negative stereotypes of Chinese “rich second-generation” as the research materials. The results show that the audience-tuning effect of negative stereotypes does in fact occur in interpersonal communication. The participants have tuned their descriptions of both stereotype-related and neutral information to suit their audience’s attitude toward the target. The audience-tuning affects the participants’ recall valence of stereotype-related information while not affecting the recall valence of neutral information. The relational motivation moderates the effect of audience-tuning on the communicator’s memory of stereotype-related information. Only participants who communicated with a desired audience displayed an audience-congruent memory bias of stereotype-related information. The results of this research reveal the bidirectional nature of stereotype-sharedness in interpersonal communication. In actual interpersonal communication, the audience could express a positive attitude toward the target who suffers from negative stereotypes, and the communicator would then convey and recall the stereotype-related information in a more positive manner based on the audience-tunning effect, which could ultimately help to decrease negative stereotypes in communication.

Converging cultures of communication: A comparative study of Internet use in China, Europe, and the United States

Global Internet use is circumscribed by local political and economic institutions and inscribed in distinctive cultural practices. This article presents a comparative study of Internet use in China, the United States, and five European countries. The empirical findings suggest a convergence of cultures, specifically regarding interpersonal communication, alongside characteristic national and sociodemographic configurations of different prototypes of human communication. Drawing on the classic understanding of communication as a cultural process producing, maintaining, repairing, and transforming a shared reality, we interpret such configurations as cultures of communication, which can be seen to differ, overlap, and converge across regions in distinctive ways. Looking beyond traditional media systems, we call for further cross-cultural research on the Internet as a generic communication system joining global and local forms of interaction.

Responsiveness processes and daily experiences of shared reality among romantic couples

Shared reality (SR) is the experience of having an inner state believed to be shared by others. Dyadic responsiveness has been suggested to be a critical process in SR construction. The present study tested the extent to which SR varies in the daily lives of romantic partners and whether this variability is related to responsiveness processes. We predicted that disclosure of personal events to one’s partner as well as perceived partner enacted responsiveness would be associated with daily levels of SR. We further predicted that these associations would be more pronounced when one has low epistemic certainty with respect to the disclosed event. To test these hypotheses, daily diaries were collected from 76 cohabiting romantic couples for a period of 4 weeks. Participants reported the occurrence of daily personal positive and negative events, indicated whether they had disclosed these events to their partner, and described how their partner had responded. As predicted, the disclosure of positive and negative events, as well as the perceptions of partners’ constructive responses to these disclosures, were positively associated with daily SR. A significant interaction was found between epistemic uncertainty (i.e., low perceived social consensus) and responsiveness processes in the context of negative (but not positive) events; specifically, when participants experienced low certainty, the disclosure of the event and the perceived partner’s constructive response were more strongly associated with SR.

Ritualized Debate

This chapter analyzes moderated debates. The chapter considers both live events and the adaptation of the debate format on online forums, arguing that debate is a central practice in contemporary atheist culture. Many atheists proclaim that debates are pointless, though the events draw large viewership and inspire extensive conversation across atheist culture. This chapter suggests, therefore, that debate is not simply a tool for relaying potentially persuasive information. Debate is a ritualized practice that circulates meanings and produces a shared reality for participants (debaters and audiences alike). This chapter examines debate to observe how communication is often more about participation and fellowship than it is about conveying information.

Relationship satisfaction in the time of COVID-19: The role of shared reality in perceiving partner support for frontline health-care workers

People often rely on partner support and shared reality during stressful and uncertain times. As such, the current research explored how these may relate to relationship satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, 155 frontline health-care workers and their significant others completed measures of shared reality and relationship satisfaction, while also indicating their levels of perceived or provided support, respectively. We proposed that shared reality would foster partners providing and health-care workers perceiving support which would, in turn, promote greater relationship satisfaction. Overall, both shared reality and partner support were positively associated with relationship satisfaction for health-care workers and their significant others. Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model with Mediation (APIMeM), we found shared reality to be associated with greater relationship satisfaction through health-care workers perceiving greater support from their partner. Our research demonstrates that shared reality may be a way for people under stress to perceive greater partner support, providing relational benefits for the couple as a whole.