A Tool for Assessing the Experience of Shared Reality: Validation of the German SR-t

Humans are highly motivated to achieve shared reality – common inner states (i.e., judgments, opinions, attitudes) with others about a target object. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon has been rapidly growing over the last decade, culminating in the development of a five-item self-report scale fo...

Verfasser: Schmalbach, Bjarne
Hennemuth, Linda
Echterhoff, Gerald
FB/Einrichtung:FB 07: Psychologie und Sportwissenschaft
Dokumenttypen:Artikel
Medientypen:Text
Erscheinungsdatum:2019
Publikation in MIAMI:02.05.2019
Datum der letzten Änderung:20.02.2020
Angaben zur Ausgabe:[Electronic ed.]
Quelle:Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019) 832, 1-14
Schlagwörter:shared reality; experienced commonality; common ground; scale development; communication; interpersonal relationships
Fachgebiet (DDC):150: Psychologie
Lizenz:CC BY 4.0
Sprache:English
Förderung:Finanziert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU Münster).
This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grant DEU1072030/USA1163502 to E. Tory Higgins (upon nomination by GE).
Format:PDF-Dokument
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-25119517800
Weitere Identifikatoren:DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00832
Permalink:https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-25119517800
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Onlinezugriff:artikel_schmalbach_2019.pdf

Humans are highly motivated to achieve shared reality – common inner states (i.e., judgments, opinions, attitudes) with others about a target object. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon has been rapidly growing over the last decade, culminating in the development of a five-item self-report scale for Shared Reality about a Target (SR-T; Schmalbach et al., unpublished). The present study aims to validate the German version of the scale. Individuals can establish shared reality either by receiving social verification (i.e., agreement or confirmation from an interaction partner) or by aligning their inner state with that of their partner. To increase the scope of the present validation, we implemented both pathways of shared-reality creation in three studies (N = 522). Study 1 employed a social judgment task, in which participants assessed ambiguous social situations and received confirming (vs. disconfirming) feedback from their partner. Studies 2 and 3 build on the saying-is-believing paradigm, in which participants align their own evaluation of the target with their partner’s judgment. Based on an evaluatively ambiguous description, participants communicated about a target person and later recalled information about the target (Study 2). To further generalize the findings, message production was omitted from the paradigm in Study 3. Overall, the five-item model of the SR-T evinced good fit and reliability. In Study 1, the SR-T reflected experimentally induced differences in commonality of judgments– even when controlling for several related state measures, such as Inclusion of Other in the Self and Need Threat. In Studies 2 and 3, the SR-T predicted participants’ evaluative recall bias, which is an established, indirect index of communicators’ shared-reality creation. This effect was stronger when participants overtly communicated with their study partner, but it still emerged without overt communication. Across all studies, correlations with related constructs support the convergent validity of the SR-T. In sum, we recommend the use of the SR-T in research on interpersonal processes and communication.