Creating a shared reality: Does construal level matter?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A key means of achieving social connection and confident representation of the world is creating a shared reality with others about target stimuli. Because high-level construals enable one to traverse initial social distance, they should also facilitate shared-reality creation. We tested this in two high-powered, pre-registered experiments with different methods to assess shared reality. In Experiment 1, participants were primed to adopt either a high- or low-level construal, and we examined whether this affected the audience-tuning effect and recall bias in the sharing-is-believing paradigm. While the construal-level manipulation did not significantly influence shared reality, the manipulation check positively correlated with the audience-tuning effect. In Experiment 2, after priming construal level, we investigated shared reality in free-flowing conversations between two participants, each about ambiguous pictures. Again, the construal-level manipulation did not significantly affect shared reality. Together, these findings do not support our initial hypothesis. A construal-level manipulation more precisely tailored to the target stimuli might have been more effective in influencing shared reality. Alternatively, motivational variables (e.g. belonging needs) may play a more central role than cognitive variables in enhancing shared reality, especially as shared reality appears to be primarily driven by motivational processes. Further implications are discussed.