Creating shared reality about ambiguous sexual harassment: The role of stimulus ambiguity in audience-tuning effects on memory

• We manipulated perceived stimulus ambiguity to test its role in the communicative creation of shared reality.
• Shared-reality creation was assessed by the adaptation of both message and later memory to the audience’ attitude.
• We extended research to material with high social and applied relevance: potential sexual harassment.
• Message and memory were audience-congruent when the harassment event remained ambiguous (vs. when it was disambiguated).
• We show the role of epistemic needs in shared-reality creation about a ubiquitous incident with potentially harmful outcomes.

By tuning messages about ambiguous information to their audience's attitude, communicators can reduce uncertainty and form audience-congruent memories. This effect has been conceptualized as the creation of shared reality with the audience. We applied this approach to representations of ambiguous antecedents of sexual harassment and examined whether the effect depends on the event's perceived ambiguity. Participants read a testimony about a supervisor's ambiguous behaviors toward a female employee and described the behaviors to an audience who had previously evaluated him positively or negatively. We manipulated perceived ambiguity of the testimony by including or omitting information about eventual, clear-cut harassment (known vs. unknown outcome). As predicted, participants aligned their messages and memory with their audience's evaluation only in the unknown-outcome condition, where epistemic uncertainty was higher. The findings highlight the role of epistemic needs in the communicative creation of a shared reality about a ubiquitous social situation with potentially harmful outcomes.