Shared Reality
2024-06-12
The Itching
This work-in-process material is just to satisfy my curiosity. As I was reflecting on the material about correlation with (objective or physical) reality in my "Make Up Your Mind" page, while reading Yuval Noah Harari's book "Sapiens", I began wondering whether there might also be some sort of shared reality that should also be accounted for in the process of constructing our personal model of How The World Works. It turns out that psychologists have a specific definition of that term and are actively conducting research in that area.
Make Up Your Mind (/make-up-your-mind.gmi)
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari @ WorldCat (https://search.worldcat.org/title/904576078)
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari @ archive.org (https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780099590088)
Is there is some advantage to be gained by the realization that shared reality is also a part of the process that each of us uses in developing our understanding of How The World Works? How much control do we, as individuals, actually have over the process (as a whole), and how much control do we have in forming our myriad shared realities?
Some Scratching
Humans are fundamentally motivated to create a sense of shared reality—the perceived commonality of inner states (feeling, beliefs, and concerns about the world) with other people. This shared reality establishes a sense of both social connection and understanding the world. Research on shared reality has burgeoned in recent decades. We first review evidence for a basic building block of shared-reality creation: sharing-is-believing, whereby communicators tune their descriptions to align with their communication partner’s attitude about something, which in turn shapes their recall. Next, we describe recent developments moving beyond this basic building block to explore generalized shared reality about the world at large, which promotes interpersonal closeness and epistemic certainty. Together, this body of work exemplifies the synergy between relational and epistemic motives. Finally, we discuss the potential for another form of shared reality—shared relevance—to bridge disparate realities.
PDF full text [here] (Higgins.Rossignac-Milon.Echterhoff.CD_.2021.pdf)
Many everyday conversations, whether between close partners or strangers interacting for the first time, are about the world external to their relationship, such as music, food, or current events. Yet, the focus of most research on interpersonal relationships to date has been on the ways in which partners perceive each other and their relationship. We propose that one critical aspect of interpersonal interactions is developing a sense of dyadic, generalized shared reality—the subjective experience of sharing a set of inner states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, or beliefs) in common with a particular interaction partner about the world in general, including the world external to the relationship. Across 9 studies, we use mixed methods to investigate the unique role of generalized shared reality in interpersonal interactions, both between close partners and strangers. We hypothesize that generalized shared reality predicts how people connect with each other and perceive the world around them. We also investigate the observable, dyadic behavioral signatures of generalized shared reality in interpersonal interactions. Finally, we examine the motivation to uphold an existing sense of generalized shared reality. We hypothesize that couples high on baseline generalized shared reality exhibit motivated, dyadic interaction behaviors to reaffirm their generalized shared reality in the face of experimentally manipulated threat. By identifying a unique dimension of everyday interactions, these studies aim to capture a critical aspect of the lived subjective experience of human relationships that has not been captured before.
To provide background for the Special Issue on shared reality, we outline the construct of shared reality and underlying mechanisms. Shared reality is the experience of having in common with others inner states about the world. Inner states include the perceived relevance of something, as well as feelings, beliefs, or evaluations of something. The experience of having such inner states in common with others fosters the perceived truth of those inner states. Humans are profoundly motivated to create shared realities with others, and in so doing they fulfill their needs to have valid beliefs about the world and to connect with others.
Shared reality is defined as the experience of having in common with others inner states about the world. Inner states include the perceived relevance of something, as well as feelings, beliefs, or evaluations of something. The experience of having such inner states in common with others fosters the perceived truth of those inner states. In creating shared realities with others, humans fulfill their needs to have valid beliefs about the world and to connect with others.
Humans have a fundamental need to experience a shared reality with others. We present a new conceptualization of shared reality based on four conditions. We posit (a) that shared reality involves a (subjectively perceived) commonality of individuals' inner states (not just observable behaviors); (b) that shared reality is about some target referent; (c) that for a shared reality to occur, the commonality of inner states must be appropriately motivated; and (d) that shared reality involves the experience of a successful connection to other people's inner states. In reviewing relevant evidence, we emphasize research on the saying-is-believing effect, which illustrates the creation of shared reality in interpersonal communication. We discuss why shared reality provides a better explanation of the findings from saying-is-believing studies than do other formulations. Finally, we examine relations between our conceptualization of shared reality and related constructs (including empathy, perspective taking, theory of mind, common ground, embodied synchrony, and socially distributed knowledge) and indicate how our approach may promote a comprehensive and differentiated understanding of social-sharing phenomena.
Shared reality theory (Echterhoff_ShRealityTheory_EncyclSocTheory.gmi)
Shared reality is currently understood as the product of the motivated process of experiencing a commonality of inner (mental) states with others about the world. First, an overview is provided about the main theoretical assumptions, including conditions of shared reality that have been proposed in recent theorizing. Second, the intellectual ancestry of the theory is traced back to approaches in three main areas, that is, interpersonal communication and language use, phenomenological approaches, and social influence research. Finally, the operationalization in empirical research and the applicability of the theory are outlined.