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Achieving "Shared Reality" in the Communication Game:
A Social Action That Creates Meaning
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E. Tory Higgins
Columbia University
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Mailing Address:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Department of Psychology
                                       Columb
ia University
                                       Scherm
erhorn Hall
                                       New
York, New York 10027
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PUBLISHED AS:
Higgins, E. T. (1992). Achieving "shared reality" in the communication game: A social action that
creates meaning. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 11, 107-131.
Abstract
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             This paper reviews research on the "communication game"
(Higgins, 1981a) that supports two sets of conclusions. The first set of conclusions concerns
communication as social action: (a) Communicators tailor their summary of target information
to suit their audience's knowledge of or attitudes toward the target; that is, they achieve
"shared reality" with their audience and thereby perform a social action. (b) Communicators'
different motivations to achieve "shared reality" with their audience influences the extent to
which they tailor their message to suit the audience, as evident in "super-tuning", "antituning", and "non-tuning". (c) When there is a delay between successive messages about a
target, communicators' use their first message to construct their second message even
though the two audiences have different characteristics. The second set of conclusions
concerns how communication as social action creates meaning: (a) Communicators use their
message summaries about a target as a direct source of information about the target even
when the message distorted the original target information to suit the audience, and these
message summaries in turn influence the communicators' own memory and impressions of
the target. (b) As the delay since communicating about the target increases,
communicators' use of their message as a source of target information persists or even
increases. (c)Communicators' messages about a target to suit their audience can have either
beneficial or detrimental effects on the accuracy of their memory and impressions of the
target.
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Key Words for Indexing Purposes:Â interpersonal communication; audience effects; social
cognition
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Achieving "Shared Reality" in the Communication Game:
A Social Action That Creates Meaning            Â
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             A decade has passed since I presented an approach to
communication, the "communication game", whose purpose was to explore the relation
between communication and social cognition (Higgins, 1981a; see also McCann & Higgins,
in press). Since that time my colleagues and I have conducted several studies testing various
implications of this approach. It is time to consider both what we have learned from this
research and what might be studied next.
             The "communication game" approach to communication was
developed as an alternative to the "information transmission" approach that dominated social
psychology during the 1960's and 70's, particularly in the United States. This approach
emphasized the transmission of information from a source or sender to a destination or
recipient and was inspired by mathematical models of communication (e.g., Shannon &
Weaver, 1949). Whether the concern was communication accuracy or communication and
persuasion, the information transmission approach dominated (see, for example, Glucksberg,
Krauss, & Higgins, 1975;Â Mehrabian & Reed, 1968; McGuire, 1969). In many ways this
approach was a child of its era, the "cognitive revolution" that began in the 60's. This
approach remained heavily cognitive even when it was applied to clearly social phenomena,
such as considering interpersonal persuasion in terms of attention, comprehension, and
retention.
             The purpose behind proposing the "communciation game"
approach was to provide an alternative "social science" perspective on interpersonal
communication-- a perspective that took seriously the insights and findings on language by
sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists and philosophers (e.g., Austin, 1962;
Garfinkle, 1967; Goffman, 1959; Grice, 1971;Â Gumperz & Hymes, 1972; Mead, 1934;
Morris, 1938; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). I believed that considering
communication from a "social science" perspective might shed new light on its relation to
social cognition. I had always been fascinated with the Whorf-Sapir notion of "linguistic
determinism" concerning the possible interrelation among language, thought, and
society, and believed that linguistic determinism at the level of pragmatics (rather than
syntax) might have important implications for social cognition. I thought that such a "social
science" perspective might reveal how the social action of communication produces meaning
in our everyday lives. How does language use in a social context influence thought?
             It was not only the study of interpersonal communication that
was dominated by the "cognitive science" perspective. Social cognition in the 70's also
emphasized cognitive structures and processes, such as schemata and inferential heuristics
(see, for example, Fiske & Taylor, 1984). Indeed, the cognitive science perspective continues
to dominate social cognition, with the major concern being how cognitive factors influence
social phenomena (the cognition of social psychology). I believed that a "social science"
perspective could also make a contribution to social cognition by considering how social
factors influence cognition (the social psychology of cognition). But what exactly is a "social
science" perspective? What makes something "social"?Â
             One answer to these questions that I especially like was
provided almost a century ago by the eminent social scientist, Max Weber (1967, pp. 156157):
                          In "action" is included all human
behavior when and in so far as the acting individual attaches
                          a subjective meaning to it...Action is
social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning
                          attached to by the acting individual
(or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others
                          and is thereby oriented in its
course.Â
Thus, action is "social" when its orientation takes account of other people (see also
Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918). Within social psychology, social cognition is concerned with the
"social" nature of "cognition". As Weber (1967) also pointed out, people assign meaning to
the events in their lives and then respond to those meanings. The social psychology of
cognition, then, is concerned with how the meaning that people assign to the events in their
lives (e.g., their representation, interpretation, and evaluation of life events) is transformed
because their actions take others into account.
             To the extent that message production and reception take others
into account, interpersonal communication is one kind of social action that can influence
cognition. In contrast to the "information transmission" approach, a major concern of the
"communication game" was how communication partners take each other into account and
its social-cognitive consequences. Thus, by taking a social science perspective, the study of
communication naturally addresses the fundamental question of how social action creates
meaning.
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Role Enactment and Role-Taking
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             Interpersonal communication is social action in at least two
major ways. First, it involves role enactment. Second, it involves role-taking (or perspectivetaking). Although there are other ways in which interpersonal communication is social action,
our research on the communication game has been concerned mainly with these two,
especially the second. Thus, the present paper will focus on the implications of these two
variables.
Role Enactment
             Role enactment is a quintessential example of "social"
action. In the traditional view, role enactment relates to conduct that adheres to
certain positions in the social structure rather than to individuals per se. Role expectations
is the conceptual link between social structure and role enactment. As defined by Sarbin and
Allen (1968), role expectations "are comprised of the rights and privileges, the duties and
obligations, of any occupant of a social position in relation to persons occupying other
positions in the social structure (pp. 497)". Role enactment in terms of role expectations,
then, is social action. Sarbin and Allen (1968) also point out that role expectations operate as
imperatives concerning a person's cognitions as well as his or her conduct during role
enactment. Thus, role enactment is social action that can influence meaning.
             Despite its promise as a window on the social psychology of
cognition, relatively little attention has been paid by social psychologists to the effects of role
enactment on cognition. In an early study, Jones and deCharms (1958) used instructions
to establish different perceiver roles (e.g., member of a judicial board of inquiry versus
member of a medical-psychological board of review) for the same target person (an exprisoner of war who had signed communistic propaganda statements). The study found that
the subjects' attributions of personality characteristics to the target on the basis of the same
target person information varied markedly depending on the role that they were
assigned. A study by Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) demonstrated the influence of
role enactment on both performance and the interpretation of it. For each pair of subjects,
one member was assigned to play the role of "questioner" and the other to play the role of
"contestant" in a "question and answer" game. The "questioner" role permitted the actor to
ask challenging questions that displayed esoteric knowledge whereas the "contestant"
role caused most actors to display a lack of such knowledge. Ross et al. found that the
subjects in the different roles evaluated their own knowledge and their partner's knowledge
differently despite being exposed to the same target behavior, with the "contestant"
subjects evaluating themselves most negatively. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
             In a classic communication study, Zajonc (1960) found that
subjects assigned the role of "transmitter" of information represent the information in a more
unified and organized way than subjects assigned the role of "recipient" even prior to the
communication taking place. Several subsequent studies basically replicated this finding
(for a review, see Higgins, 1981). The results of these studies suggest that even preparation
for role enactment can influence how information is processed. Many of these earlier studies,
however, confounded role assignment with expectations of receiving additional information
about the target; specifically, only subjects assigned the role of "recipient" expected to
receive later more information about the target. To control for this problem, role assignment
and target information expectations were manipulated separately in a study by Higgins,
McCann, and Fondacaro (1982). Consistent with previous conclusions about the "transmitter"
or "speaker" role (but not the "recipient" role), the "transmitter" role was found to influence
cognition independent of target information expectations. Together, the results of this
literature suggest that speakers tend to polarize and distort stimulus information in
preparation for message production in order to meet their role-related obligation to produce
clear, concise messages. The "cognitive tuning" literature, then, provides an excellent
example of how taking into account others, in this case others' expectations about one's role
obligations, influences the representation of social information.
Role-Taking 1: Tailoring Messages to Suit the Audience's Knowledge
             Successful role enactment requires taking into account the
expectations and standards of others. Role-taking or perspective-taking involves inferences
about how others would respond to a particular stimulus or situation. Successful role
enactment, therefore, requires role-taking. [Role-taking, on the other hand, need not lead to
role enactment). There are two basic kinds of role-taking: (a) "putting oneself in someone
else's shoes", or situational role-taking, which involves infering how you would respond if you
were in the situation of another person; and (b) "seeing the world through another person's
eyes", or individual role-taking, which involves infering how another person would respond if
he or she were in your situation (see Higgins, 1981b). Role-taking is a fundamental
process underlying all social interaction, including interpersonal communication. A basic rule
of interpersonal communication is that each participant should take their partner's
characterisitics into account (Grice, 1971; Mead, 1934; Piaget, 1926).
             In considering the nature and consequences of people following
this rule, the communication literature has focused mostly on communicators taking into
account their audience's knowledge of a topic (see, for example, Clark & Haviland, 1977;
Fussell & Krauss, 1989; Glucksberg et al., 1975; Grice,1975; Higgins, 1977). We also
considered this case in our research on the communication game). Our particular concern,
however, was to examine how taking into account another's knowledge influenced the
representation of social information; that is, how this type of social action creates meaning
(see Higgins et al., 1982).
             Half of the communicators believed that their audience had
received basically the same information about the target person, and the other half of the
communicators believed that their audience had received different information about the
target person. In fact, all subjects received exactly the same target person information. All
communicators were asked to describe and interpret the target person information for their
audience. To follow the rule of saying something worthwhile (Grice, 1975), the
communicators with the same target information as the audience should emphasize
interpretation over description (i.e., give their personal opinion) whereas the communicators
with different target information than the audience should emphasize description over
interpretation. Indeed, the communicators who believed they had different target information
than the audience were more likely than communicators with the same target information to
"stick to the facts" (i.e., produce messages in which the target information was neither
distorted nor deleted nor evaluatively polarized); that is, they were more likely to emphasize
description over interpretation.
             What was the effect of this social action on meaning? All
subjects recalled the original target person information both before and after producing their
message. As shown in Table 1, the recall of the communcators who emphasized
interpretation over description (because their audience supposedly had the same information
as them) was less accurate after they produced the message than before (i.e., more
distortions, deletions, or evaluative polarizations). Some decrease in accuracy over time
would be expected simply because of the increased delay between input and recall. Thus, it
is all the more remarkable that the recall of the communicators who emphasized
description over interpretation (because their audience supposedly had different target
information than them) was, if anything, more accurate after they produced the message than
before (see Table 1). Social action in this case supported accurate recall.
-----------------------------Insert Table 1 about here
-----------------------------ÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ
             These results indicate that not only do communicators take their
audience's knowledge into account in producing their message, but that this social action
impacts on their own later knowledge of the subject of the message (i.e., changes in
memory). It should be noted that these effects on the communicators' own knowledge were
not simply a direct effect of the audience's supposed knowledge because the information
about the audience's knowledge was available at the time of both their post-message and
pre-message recall. Thus, differences in message production that took into account
differences in audience knowledge, i.e., social action, were critical in creating differences in
meaning.
             Although clearly important, the knowledge of one's audience
about the subject of the message is not the only audience characteristic that communicators
need to take into account. Indeed, from a "social" perspective other audience characteristics
might be even more important. One such characteristic is the audience's attitude toward the
subject of the message. Everyone has had the experience of talking about someone to
another person who one believes likes or dislikes the person being talked about. Most people
feel some pressure to describe the target person in a way that does not conflict with the
audience's attitude. But beyond this social pressure, taking into account the audience's
attitude in producing one's message simply follows the rule that communicators should take
their audience's characteristics into account. And there is considerable evidence that
communicators do, in fact, tailor their message to suit their audience's attitude or opinion
about the subject of the message (e.g., Higgins & Rholes, 1978; Manis, Cornell, & Moore,
1974; Newtson & Czerlinsky, 1974). How does this common social action influence social
cognition? Much of the research program on the communication game has explored the
intricacies of this seemingly simple question. In so doing, some major issues about the
relation between communication and social cognition have been considered. Let us turn now
to these issues.
Role-Taking 2: Tailoring Messages to Suit the Audience's Attitude
             Our first study on audience attitude effects involved
undergraduates at Princeton who believed they were assistants in an experiment on
communication as a source of information transmission by describing a target person to
another student (the audience) who would use their message to try to identify the target
person. Both the target person and the audience were supposedly in the same "eating club"
at Princeton. Prior to giving the communicator some written information about the target
person, the experimenter casually mentioned that other information indicated that the
audience either liked or disliked the target person.
             This audience-attitude manipulation had a major effect on how
the communicators summarized the target person information. The target person information
contained evaluatively ambiguous behaviors of the target (e.g., behaviors that could be
equally labelled "confident" or "conceited"; behaviors that could be equally labelled
"persistent" or "stubborn"), unambiguously positive behaviors of the target (e.g., behaviors
that could only be labelled "athletic"), and unambiguously negative behaviors of the target
(e.g., behaviors that could only be labelled "short-tempered"). As shown in Table 2,
communicators labelled both the ambiguous and the unambiguous target information more
positively in their messages when they believed that the audience liked the target person
than when they believed that the audience disliked the target person.
-----------------------------Insert Table 2 about here
-----------------------------Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Did this social action of taking another's attitude into account in
one's message production influence the communicators' own memory of the original target
information? As predicted, it did. Table 3 shows that the communicators' reproductions of
the target person information were significantly distorted in the evaluative direction
represented by their audience's attitude. Additional correlational analyses comparing
subjects' messages and recall also indicated that communicators tended to use their
message more as a source of information two weeks later than immediately. If
communicators attempt to recall the original target information almost immediately after
reading it and producing their message (i.e., 20 minutes later), they can and should rely on
their mental representation of the target details to the extent that this representation is
relatively complete and accessible. Two weeks later this mental representation of the target
details is unlikely to be complete or accessible. Now the message, as a summary of the
target information, is useful and even necessary as an additional source of information for
reconstructive memory. It is notable that this directional-distortion effect increased over
time for the unambiguous information but was evident for the ambiguous information almost
immediately. This makes sense because even after 20 minutes subjects may need to use
their messages to reconstruct the ambiguous information.
------------------------------
Insert Table 3 about here
------------------------------Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
             It was clear in this study as well that the effect of audience
tuning on memory was not due simply to a direct influence of the audience's attitude on
memory (e.g., some kind of informational conformity effect). First, any direct effect of
audience attitude on recall should be greater after 20 minutes than after two weeks because
both salience of the attitude and the need to be consistent with it would be greater after a
brief delay. But the recall distortion for unambiguous information was found only after the two
week delay. Second, because of a supposed "experimenter error", half of the subjects in the
study were given the information about their audience's attitude and expected to
communicate but did not actually communicate. These subjects did not distort their recall in
the direction of the audience's attitude.
             The strength of communicators' motivation to tailor their
message about a target person to suit the attitude of their audience toward the target person
is well illustrated in a study by Sedikides (1990; Study 2). This study used the same basic
paradigm as the Higgins and Rholes (1978) study. But in this study the subjects read the
target person information before they even received the communication instructions or
learned about the audience's attitude. In addition, subjects' representation of the target
person information had already been experimentally influenced by priming or activating
particular trait constructs. Despite all this, the subjects still tailored their summaries of the
target person information to suit the attitude of the audience. That is, the motivation to
achieve "common ground" was so strong that it overrode prior effects of priming on the initial
representation of the target information. Moreover, consistent with the results of our studies,
the communicators' own personal impressions of the target person were more consistent
with their audience-tailored message than with the primed constructs.
             These memory and impression effects from tailoring messages
to suit the audience's attitude are another example of how social action can create meaning.
What is especially interesting about such cases is that the communcators take their audience
into account in producing their message, but do not take this audience-tuning sufficiently into
account when they later use their messages in reconstructive memory. This is precisely why
social action can create meaning. If the communicators during recall took into account
sufficiently their previous "taking into account" during communication, then the messages
produced would facilitate and not distort recall. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, for
communicators to calibrate the extent to which the source of their message is just the target
information itself (i.e.,the data) versus their tailoring of the message to suit the audience (i.e.,
the communicative context). Communicators are likely to underestimate the extent to which
their audience tuning is a source of the message, and, therefore, this social action is likely to
create meaning (e.g, produce memory distortions).
Role-taking 3: Tailoring Messages to Suit Successive Audiences
             In the Higgins and Rholes (1978) study, the communicators
produced a single message to a single audience. Most interpersonal communication studies
have used this basic paradigm. But interpersonal communication in everyday life often
involves communicating about some subject to more than one person over time. Imagine that
you had some knowledge about a person and summarized this knowledge for two different
audiences, first for an audience you believed liked the person and then for an audience you
believed disliked the person. We know from previous studies that you would probably
summarize your knowledge of the target person in a somewhat positive manner for the first
audience. But what would you do for the second audience? And would your impressions of
the target person be influenced more by your message to the first audience or by your
message to the second audience?
             For a variety of reasons one might expect that the first audience
would determine both subsequent messages and meaning construction. Traditional models
of communication audience effects have stated that it is the first audience that is critical (e.g.,
Zimmerman & Bauer, 1956). And "consistency" models generally suggest that people would
be motivated to respond later to a target person in a manner that was consistent with their
initial response to the target (see Abelson, Aronson, McGuire, Newcomb, Rosenberg, and
Tannenbaum, 1968). Recent social-cognitive models, however, raise the possibility that the
time interval between the first and second messages might be critical in determining the
impact of the second audience on message production and subsequent personal
impressions.
             If the stored details of the original target information become
increasingly inaccessible over time, then communicators would increasingly rely on their first
message as a source of target information-- both for their subsequent message and for their
own impressions of the target (see Higgins & Rholes, 1978). There may also be an
increasing consolidation or integration of the representation of the target details and the
message representation of the target (see Wyer & Srull, 1986). If so, the impact of
communicators' first message on their subsequent message and on their own impressions of
the target would also increase over time. According to both of these information-processing
models, then, when there is a long delay between the first and second messages, the impact
of the first audience on communicators' first message should produce a primacy effect on
both the second message and subsequent personal impressions. But when there is only a
brief delay he first and second messages, the second message should be tuned to the
second audience and have the greater impact on personal impressions by virtue of being
both most accessible and the "final word" on the target.
             This study modified the basic Higgins and Rholes (1978)
paradigm to increase its ecological validity. In this study the communicators interacted faceto-face with each audience under circumstances in which they believed that their audience
would personally benefit by their summaries of the target person's characteristics. [The two
audiences were both confederates of the experimenter.] The communicators believed that
their summaries would help the audience make a decision about whether to select the target
person as a roommate [all participants were male]. Before the communicators gave their
summary to the audience, the audience mentioned that he had met the target person briefly
and that his initial impression of the target person was either positive or negative ("kinda
liked" or "kinda disliked" the target). The communicators received an essay describing
various characteristics of the target. They summarized this information to two different
audiences, either only 15 minutes apart (the Brief Intermessage Delay) or one week apart
(the Long Intermessage Delay). In an orthogonal design, the first audience either liked or
disliked the target person and the second audience either liked or disliked the target person.
The communicators' own impressions of the target person were obtained one week after
their second message.
             Consistent with the results of previous studies, the
communicators tailored their message to suit the expressed attitude of their first audience.
The communicators' labelling of the target person information was more positive when they
communicated to an audience who supposedly liked the target person than when they
communicated to an audiece who supposedly dislike the target person. It is notable that this
audience-tuning effect occurred despite the audience stating that their expressed attitude
toward the target person represented only an initial impression based on a brief encounter
with the target person and despite the fact that the audiences stated that an accurate
description of the target person would be most useful in helping them decide whether to
select him as a roommate. These results thus demonstrate the powerful effect of audience
attitude on communicators' social action.
             As predicted, the labelling in communicators' message to the
second audience was tailored to suit the second audience's attitude when there was only a
brief delay between the first and second messages. But when there was a long delay (one
week) between the first and second messages, the evaluative tone of the second message
labelling was determined by the evaluative tone of the first message labelling (see Figure 1).
The results indicate that after the long delay communicators used the first message to
represent the target person information and then used this first message representation as
the basis for their second message. Thus for information-processing reasons, the
communicators' second social action, after a long delay, was determined by their first social
action.
-----------------------------Insert Figure 1 about here
-----------------------------Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â It is notable that there was no message tailoring in this study to
suit the attitude of the second audience when there was a long delay between the first and
second messages.These results indicate that there is a variable that constrains audience
tuning in message production-- the target data. The target person information in these
studies is evaluatively ambiguous, both by containing some behaviors that are inherently
ambiguous and by containing equal numbers of positive and negative behaviors. Such
ambiguous data minimally constrains the evaluative tone of the message. Thus, audience
tuning can ordinarily be realized without misrepresenting the data. When there is a long delay
between the first and second messages, however, the evaluative implications of the first
message can polarize or disambiguate the represented target person information. This
constructed or consolidated "data" would now be either unambiguously positive or
unambiguoulsy negative. It would no longer be possible to summarize the target information
in whichever direction suited the second audience without misrepresenting it. Thus, the target
data sets constraints on the amount of audience tuning that will occur.
             When audience tuning did occur, how did this social action
influence communicators' own impressions of the target person one week later? Once again,
the impact of social action on construction of meaning was most evident when there was
there was the longest post-message delay-- for the first audience attitude/long intermessage
delay condition. Communicators' delayed impressions in this condition were more positively
distorted when they tailored their first message to an audience who supposedly liked the
target person (M...
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