Furthermore, the process by which the SIB effect occurs has been explained using the concept of shared reality ( Echterhoff et al., 2009). This finding has been replicated many times within similar interpersonal communication contexts ( Higgins and Rholes, 1978 Higgins and McCann, 1984 Sedikides, 1990 McCann et al., 1991 Echterhoff et al., 2005, 2008, 2017 Hausmann et al., 2008 Kopietz et al., 2010). This audience tuning ( Higgins, 1992) also drove positive or negative distortions in participants’ recall and impression of the original stimulus information, wherein prior impressions or memories of the target person were transformed into more evaluative extremes in the positive (or negative) direction after a positive (or negative) message was created. On the other hand, when participants had been informed that the audience disliked the target person, they were more likely to create negative representations of that person for their audience.

When participants had been led to believe that the audience liked the target person, they tended to create positive messages about that person to help their audience to identify that person among four possible persons. In initial SIB paradigm experiments, participants first read stimulus information describing a target person’s evaluatively ambiguous behaviors (e.g., a behavior that can be perceived as either persistent or stubborn). The SIB effect suggests that when a communicator tailors a message to a target audience, sharing the tailored message with the target audience changes the communicator’s subsequent memory and impression. Studies of interpersonal communication have shown that tailoring and sharing messages with a particular audience affects the communicator’s subsequent memory and impression of the message topic this phenomenon is known as the “saying-is-believing effect” (SIB Higgins and Rholes, 1978). However, little attention has been paid to how communicators’ shared experiences influence their attitudes. An influence on decision-making has also been reported, such as the effect of consumer reviews on comparable book sales ( Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006) and early adoption of new products ( Iyengar et al., 2011). For example, rapidly spreading information has influenced world events, including the Arab Spring ( Russell, 2011) and the 2016 U.S. People also use electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in the form of online shopping website reviews (e.g., Amazon) to share their experiences with a product or service with unknown others (e.g., Amazon users).Īlthough such interpersonal communication requires at least two parties, a communicator and an audience, most previous research has focused on the influence that posting and sharing has on the audience, such as information spreading and decision-making. For example, people frequently use microblogging platforms (e.g., Twitter) to share their everyday happenings with networked others (e.g., followers). People now share their experiences with others through social networking services by posting on Internet forums, websites, or blogs. These results suggest that perceiving a large audience as a group influences the subsequent impressions of electronic word-of-mouth product or service communicators. Furthermore, tuning the message to the audience was found to bias communicators’ subsequent impressions of the topic in a direction closer to the audience’s attitude. The results showed that communicators tuned their messages to the audience’s attitude when they perceived group entitativity and epistemic trust. We manipulated communicators’ perceived group entity for a large audience and the audience’s prior attitudinal valence and measured the audience’s epistemic trust. In this study, we examined the conditions under which audience tuning and attitude bias can occur with audiences containing more than one individual. Research on the saying-is-believing effect has shown that when an individual’s attitude is perceived in advance by a communicator, the communicator tunes the message to the person, which biases the communicator’s attitude toward the person’s attitude. This research investigated how interpersonal communication with a large audience can influence communicators’ attitudes.

2Junior College, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, Japan.

1Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan.Tingchang Liang 1*, Zhao Lin 2 and Toshihiko Souma 1

Perception definition communication