Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2020 Two sides to every story: The influence of audience on autobiographical memory Abby Sue Boytos Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.edu/etd Recommended Citation Boytos, Abby Sue, "Two sides to every story: The influence of audience on autobiographical memory" (2020). Graduate Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/17953 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact digirep@iastate.
Two sides to every story: The influence of audience on autobiographical memory by Abby Boytos A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Major: Psychology Program of Study Committee: Kristi Costabile, Major Professor Kevin Blankenship Jason Chan The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred. Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2020 Copyright © Abby Boytos, 2020. All rights reserved.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .6 Social Influences of Autobiographical Memories. 7 The Present Research .79 Limitations and Future Directions. EXPERIMENT 1 ESSAY CODED VARIABLES. EXPERIMENT 2 ESSAY CODED VARIABLES .92 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my major professor, Dr.
Kristi Costabile, who provided helpful feedback and support during all stages of this project. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Kevin Blankenship and Dr. Jason Chan, for their hard work and feedback throughout the course of this research.
In addition, I would like to thank the undergraduate research assistants in our lab who helped collect and code the data for this project. I would also like to thank all of those who were willing to participate in my experiments, without whom this research would not have been possible. Lastly, I am appreciative of my friends, colleagues, and the department faculty and staff at Iowa State who have helped make my time here a wonderful experience. iv ABSTRACT Individuals describe their life experiences differently in response to their audience’s verbal and behavioral cues, which in turn, influences how the teller connects the experiences to the self-concept (Weeks & Pasupathi, 2011).
Research on audience tuning (Higgins, 1992) suggests that one reason audiences influence communication is that people are motivated to form a shared reality with their audience (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Groll, 2005). Combining research on autobiographical memory with that on audience tuning, the current project considers how communicating about personal memories with others can affect how individuals describe and reflect on their autobiographical memories, and how motivation to form a shared reality with others affects this process. Experiment 1 examined the effects of audience perspective on event memory descriptions, memory topic attitudes, and the self-typicality of the described memory. In this experiment, participants were asked to think about a personal memory related to a specific topic and then, were randomly assigned to write about that experience for an audience that had either a positive or negative perspective on the topic or for an audience whose perspective is unknown.
Experiment 2 examined whether the audience-bias effect occurs as a function of memory elaboration. Contrary to predictions, results of both experiments indicated that participants’ memory descriptions and self-typicality of the memories were not biased in the direction of their audience. However, as predicted, subsequent attitudes about the memory topic and event memory perceptions were biased in the direction of the audience’s perspective. Moreover, results of Experiment 2 indicated that the audience-bias effect was observed only when communicators were permitted to elaborate on their memories, indicating the importance of elaboration to the biasing process.
In addition, across both experiments, the audience-bias effect was more pronounced for individuals who experienced greater shared reality with their v audience. This project highlights the importance of audience perspective and shared reality in relation to communication about self-relevant experiences. LITERATURE REVIEW Autobiographical memories are recollections about personal past experiences. Like other types of memory, autobiographical memories are influenced by social factors, such as audience, that are salient at the time of retrieval (Marsh & Tversky, 2004; Tversky & Marsh, 2000).
Thus, autobiographical memories are episodic by nature, both in the sense that they represent a specific time and space from one’s life and in the sense that each telling of the memory is influenced by the context in which it is told. When one describes an autobiographical event, the memory description becomes a product of the social interaction between the speaker and audience, which can then influence subsequent retellings of the described event (Pasupathi, 2001). The current project seeks to further understanding of the social aspects of autobiographical memory and how audience may influence how individuals come to perceive past experiences. Audience Tuning Good communicators consider the background knowledge, opinions, and attitudes of their audience and adjust their message accordingly (Higgins, 1992; Higgins, McCann & Fondacaro, 1982).
The term audience refers to the message recipient(s) and may refer to a single or multiple individuals. At minimum, communicators must be able to establish a reference point with their audience and attempt to meet the audience’s basic informational needs. People tend to be quite adept at this. For example, even young children who were asked to describe objects automatically adjusted their object descriptions for people depending on whether the individuals were wearing a blindfold or not (Higgins, 1977).
This process of audience tuning, or adjusting one’s message according to the audience, can have lasting effects on the communicator’s own perceptions of the message being communicated (Echterhoff, Higgins & Groll, 2005; Echterhoff, Kopietz & Higgins, 2013; Higgins, 1992). For instance, audience tuning has been shown to influence communicators’ own 2 memory of the message. Higgins (1992) first demonstrated this effect in a pair of studies. In the first study, participants received ambiguous information about a target person, for example, behaviors that can be characterized as either ‘stubborn’ or ‘persistent.’ Participants were then asked to describe the target person to an audience who had either received the same information or different information about the target person as they did.
When participants believed the audience received the same information, they were more likely to focus on interpretation of the information rather than on description; however, when participants believed the audience received different information, they were more likely to focus on description than on interpretation of the information. As a result, participants who focused more on interpretation of the information had less accurate memories about the message than did participants who focused on simply describing the information. Higgins’ (1992) second study explored how the attitude of one’s audience may influence communication and thus, the communicator’s own beliefs. In a similar paradigm, participants received a list of ambiguous, positive, and negative behaviors performed by a target person and were asked to describe the target person to another student who ostensibly knew the target person.
Participants were told that the student either liked or did not like the target person. Results of this study indicated that participants described the target person more positively when they believed their audience liked the target person than when they believed their audience disliked the target person. Consequently, participants’ own memory about the target person became more congruent with the view of their audience, an effect that was still apparent two weeks after the initial session. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that the process of audience tuning results in biasing of the communicators’ own memories and perceptions of the original information.
3 Shared Reality One reason that people are so willing to adjust their messages for their audience is that people are motivated to create a shared reality (Echterhoff, Higgins & Levine, 2009). Inherent in human nature is the desire to share and validate our experiences with others. Many of the classic studies within social psychology hinge on the desire for social verification (Asch, 1955; Festinger 1950; Lewin, 1943; Sherif, 1937). One way that people fulfill this need for social verification is to create a shared reality with others.
A shared reality is a product of the motivated process to experience commonality with others’ inner states about the world (Echterhoff et al. Thus, a shared reality may occur during communication as people share information about their own inner states relating to some target referent and, learn information about others’ inner states regarding the target referent (Hogg & Rinella, 2018). Shared reality serves both epistemic (i., understanding the world) and relational needs (i., connecting with others, Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz, & Groll, 2008). It is through the sharing of internal states such as attitudes, feelings, and emotions that people are able to take subjective experiences and create objective meaning and reality.
According to Hardin and Higgins (1996), “When an experience is recognized and shared with others in the process of social interaction, it achieves reliability, validity, generality, and predictability” (p. Just as a scientific discovery lacking in reliability, validity, generality, or predictability would not be upheld, it is argued that social experiences without a shared reality tend to be transitory and ephemeral (Hardin and Higgins, 1996). Memory Biases Due to the innate desire to establish commonality, as described above, individuals often express ideas that are contradictory to what they actually believe to be true (Asch, 1955; Larsen, 1974). Moreover, people tend to believe what they say even when it lacks truthfulness, an effect 4 that Higgins (1999) termed the saying-is-believing effect.
This effect is demonstrated in the classic audience tuning experiments described previously, where after describing a target person to an audience that either likes or dislikes the target person, the communicator’s own memory of the original information about the target person becomes biased toward the view of the audience. Audience tuning effects on memory have been consistently demonstrated across a number of studies (Echterhoff et al., 2005; Echterhoff et al., 2008; Echterhoff, Kopietz & Higgins, 2013; Higgins, 1992; Higgins, 1999). Audience tuning is also consistent with previous research that indicates that elaboration of one’s beliefs through writing can alter one’s mental representations about the message (Echterhoff et al., 2009) and can increase belief perseverance (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980). To examine whether message elaboration (i., a coherent description of the message to the audience) is necessary for the audience-bias effect to occur, participants read an ambiguous passage about a target person and were told that they would be asked to describe the target person to another student who ostensibly either liked or did not like the target person (Higgins, Echterhoff, Crespillo, & Kopietz, 2007).
They were told that their oral descriptions would be recorded. However, only half of the participants actually described the target person and the other half of participants were told that the voice recorder was being used by another experimenter and that the study could go on without the description. Results demonstrated an audience-bias effect only for participants who elaborated such that for those who actually described the target person, more positive information was recalled when the audience liked the target person than when the audience did not like the target person, an effect that was not observed for those who did not provide oral descriptions. 5 The importance of message elaboration is also consistent with the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, which posits that the more people elaborate on an opposing argument, the more likely the argument is to influence their attitudes (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
However, unlike persuasion, audience tuning effects occur without an explicit attempt to change people’s attitudes. Rather, one explanation for the saying-is-believing effect is that it represents a source monitoring error (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993; Schachter & Singer, 1962), or a misattribution of an outcome to something other than the legitimate source.