E. Tory Higgins

After communicators have tuned a message about a target person’s behaviors to their audience’s attitude, their recall of the target’s behaviors is often evaluatively consistent with their audience’s attitude. This audience-tuning effect on recall has been explained as resulting from the communicators’ creation of a shared reality with the audience, which helps communicators to achieve epistemic needs for confident judgments and knowledge. Drawing on the ROAR (Relevance Of A Representation) model, we argue that shared reality increases the cognitive accessibility of information consistent (vs. inconsistent) with the audience’s attitude, due to enhanced truth relevance of this information. We tested this prediction with a novel reaction-time task in three experiments employing the saying-is-believing paradigm. Faster reactions to audience-consistent (vs. audience-inconsistent) information were found for trait information but not for behavioral information. Thus, audience-congruent accessibility bias emerged at the level at which impressions and judgments of other persons are typically organized. Consistent with a shared-reality account, the audience-consistent accessibility bias was correlated with perceived shared reality about the target person and with epistemic trust in the audience. Among possible explanations, the findings are best reconciled with the view that the creation of shared reality with an audience triggers basic and" automatic"(spontaneous, low-level) cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the retrieval of audience-congruent (vs. audience-incongruent) trait information about a target person.

When postgraduate students join their program, they establish commonalities of inner states (feelings, beliefs, concerns) with members of different, intertwined groups. Are those commonalities perceived as distinct based on group type? If so, which type affects students the most? We address these questions leveraging the shared reality construct: the perceived commonality of inner states with others. In two empirical, longitudinal studies, we survey graduate students as they establish shared realities with small teams, their class cohort (cluster), and the broader school community. We show that each shared reality with different groups is perceived distinctively, and the one shared with cohort members has the strongest relationship with students’ engagement with the program. We explore a shared reality antecedent and discuss interventions.

The “cognitive revolution” threw out motivation (the baby) along with animal SR learning (the bath water). Carol Dweck wants to place motivation again at the heart of psychology. And she has been a leader in doing just that. She has made fundamental contributions not only to our understanding of major motivational mechanisms but also to solving real-world problems. Her history of continually asking “Why” defines “programmatic” research. When she finds an initial answer to her fundamental question,“Why do some people fulfill their potential while others do not?” she always asks a follow-up “Why?” to dig even deeper. In this way, she discovered that people have different mindsets about whether ability is fixed versus permits growth. Those who believe ability is fixed want to repeatedly affirm it. She developed interventions that can change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, which significantly helps people to …

Variety‐seeking research has examined antecedents in terms of contextual factors and individual differences. However, it does not consider the interaction of individual difference factors such as regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) and regulatory mode (locomotion vs. assessment) to predict variety‐seeking. Drawing on regulatory fit theory, this study introduces a new kind of regulatory fit based on the interaction between regulatory focus and mode (i.e., regulatory focus–mode fit), thereby extending previous work examining fit based on either regulatory focus or regulatory mode in isolation. Results from five studies, including field data from 10,547 music app consumers (text analysis), two preregistered studies, and two online experiments, show that regulatory focus–mode fit (vs. non‐fit) decreases variety‐seeking. Engagement and attitude certainty serially mediate regulatory focus–mode fit effects. Findings …

How can social media managers engage consumers to share posts with others? Extending regulatory mode theory, we demonstrate that high construal levels enable the integration of regulatory mode complementarity orientations, resulting in engagement and shares. Regulatory mode complementarity refers to the combination of high assessment (i.e., the motivation to “be right” by critically evaluating options) and high locomotion (i.e., the motivation to “act” by moving toward a goal). Specifically, this research proposes that an abstract (vs. concrete) construal allows these two orientations to work together, resulting in regulatory fit. Three text analysis field studies on marketer‐ and consumer‐generated Facebook and Twitter posts show that construal–regulatory mode fit increases social media sharing. Three follow‐up studies then show generalizability, establish causality, and demonstrate the role of engagement as …

Research focusing on motivation has consistently identified changes in motivational emphases as individuals age. However, whether these same patterns exist with respect to more domain-general conceptualizations of these motives has not yet been examined. Furthermore, researchers have not determined whether these differences in motivations across age groups are associated with differences in different measures of well-being. Using three cross-sectional samples, we examine the relative importance individuals place on different motivational domains across different age groups. In Studies 1a and 1b, we show that age is negatively associated with growth motive importance, but is unassociated with security, control, or epistemic motive importance. In Study 2, we show that older adults who do not show this de-emphasis of growth motives have significantly lower life satisfaction and lower self-reported …

Why are some people more successful than others? In addition to individual factors (eg self-control), research has recently suggested that the quality of people’s interpersonal relationships is crucial for success. Successful people do not just like and feel close to instrumental objects (eg, study material, the gym), they also like and feel close to instrumental others (IOs; people who make goal success more likely). Yet instrumental people have one crucially distinct feature that instrumental objects do not: A mind of their own. We propose that while a growing body of work suggests that the sense of closeness to IOs (others who make goal success more likely) is crucial for goal success, prior work has not examined how the sense of the quality of people’s relationships with IOs, and therefore goal success, likely depends on their ability to “merge minds” with them, experiencing both the goal and the world at large (ie …

Leaders today must motivate followers to engage in organizational change. Although leader change visions are considered a key motivator, limited research and theory explore how leaders’ use of different change visions influences the extent to which followers are motivated to pursue organizational change goals. Building on issue selling and sensemaking literatures, we offer an expanded typology of leader change visions that more fully represents how leaders can depict the future state of their organization to create a case for change. We further propose a framework that explains how and under what conditions leader change visions motivate followers—individually and collectively—to support change efforts. To explain how followers respond to change initiatives, we highlight the role of regulatory construal fit—the degree to which leader change visions fit with followers’ understanding of the threats or …