Social Psychology

How useful are routine vaccinations? How dangerous is mobile phone radiation to one’s health? Should we use nuclear power in order to prevent climate change? Science provides important, but often ambiguous and contradictory, information about these issues. We want to form attitudes or opinions about these topics, especially when they matter to us or even have an existential meaning to us. Forming an attitude helps us to take a position and adjust our decisions and actions accordingly.

In our project, we investigate the processes that contribute to forming an opinion in conversations about such ambiguous topics. First, we examine whether one’s attitude can be affected by the expectation of communication, even when the attitude of the anticipated communication partner is unknown. Previous research suggests that the anticipation of producing a message can lead us to form more coherent and more extreme attitudes toward a topic, especially when already have an initial stance or preexisting attitude. This effect has been dubbed cognitive tuning. Assume that you are expecting a conversation about climate change with either a layperson or a climate expert. We predict that you will be more likely to create more coherent and extreme attitudes, and thus exhibit cognitive tuning, when preparing for a conversation with the layperson. This is because an expert could possibly ask more elaborate queries, so that you feel you should remain more open-minded.

Moreover, we examine cases in which the expert’s opinion about ambiguous scientific topics is known. When would we tune our own attitudes to the conversation partner’s opinion? We think that the experience of a personal connection with the expert plays a crucial role. Therefore, we want to experimentally manipulate the experience of a personal connection with an expert. Does it matter whether the partner sees one’s messages immediately and can therefore react instantly or whether she or he responds only after a delay, such as in Internet forums or e-mail? Are we more likely to tune our opinion to the conversation partner’s opinion when the partner discloses information about private issues (such as autobiographical facts, hobbies or personal preferences) or when her or his language signals a greater connection? For instance, we suspect that people are more likely to experience a connection with an expert when she or he uses the plural pronoun “we” rather than the corresponding two singular pronouns (“you and I”).

Publications:

Echterhoff, G. (in press a). The creation of shared reality in interpersonal communication: The role of epistemic processes. European Review of Social Psychology.

Echterhoff, G. (in press b). Shared reality theory. In B.S. Turner (Ed.), Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. New York: Wiley.

Echterhoff, G. & Kopietz, R. (in press). The socially shared nature of memory: From joint encoding to communication. In M. Meade, A. Barnier, C. Harris, & J. Sutton (Eds.), Collaborative remembering: How remembering with others influences memory. Oxford University Press.

Bebermeier, S., Echterhoff, G., Bohner, G., & Hellmann, J.H. (2015). The generalization of shared reality: When communication about one target shapes evaluations of other targets. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 623-640.

Conference Contributions:

Knausenberger, J. & Echterhoff, G. (2016, July). The influence of communication with experts on lay people’s memory for inconsistent scientific evidence. Symposium presentation at the 6th International Conference on Memory (ICOM 6) in Budapest (Hungary).

Echterhoff, G. (2016, February). Invited guest lecture at the Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld, February 2016, on shared reality in interpersonal communication with a focus on the role of the communication partner’s epistemic expertise

Knausenberger, J. & Echterhoff, G. (2015, September). Cognitive Tuning bei der Kommunikation mit Experten zu uneindeutiger wissenschaftlicher Evidenz [Cognitive Tuning in communication with experts regarding ambigous scientific evidence]. Oral presentation at the Meeting of the Fachgruppe Sozialpsychologie (Social Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society), University of Potsdam, Germany.

Knausenberger, J. & Echterhoff, G. (2015, September). Einflüsse der Kommunikation mit Experten auf die Bewertung uneindeutiger wissenschaftlicher Evidenz: Cognitive Tuning [Influences of communication with experts on the judgment of ambigous scientific evidence: Cognitive Tuning]. Oral presentation at the Annual Meeting of the DFG priority program “Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit” [Science and the Public], University Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Knausenberger, J. & Echterhoff, G. (2015, May). Effects of Communication with Experts on the Evaluation of Ambiguous Scientific Evidence: Cognitive Tuning and Social Tuning. Oral presentation at the PhD school of the DFG priority program “Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit” [Science and the Public], University of Marburg, Germany.

Applicant 1:
Prof. Dr. Gerald Echterhoff
Universität Münster
Institut für Psychologie
AE Sozialpsychologie
Fliednerstr. 21
48149 Münster
0251/83-34386
g.echterhoff@uni-muenster.de
Website
Forschungsschwerpunkte/-interessen
social influence
communication and language
memory biases
situated social cognition– social contagion – shared reality– simulation and attribution of actions –intergroup processes
emotions in social context (responses to infidelity, jealousy)

Staff 1
Dipl.-Psych. Judith Knausenberger
Universität Münster
Institut für Psychologie
AE Sozialpsychologie
Fliednerstr. 21
48149 Münster
0251/83 343 81
judith.knausenberger@uni-muenster.de
Website
Forschungsschwerpunkte/-interessen
Political psychology
intergroup processes
intergroup and interpersonal conflict
interpersonal communication