How Group Perception Affects What People Share and How People Feel: The Role of Entitativity and Epistemic Trust in the “Saying-Is-Believing” Effect

Abstract

This research investigated how interpersonal communication with a large audience can influence communicators’ attitudes. 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. In this study, we examined the conditions under which audience tuning and attitude bias can occur with audiences containing more than one individual. We manipulated communicators’ perceived group entity for a large audience and the audience’s prior attitudinal valence and measured the audience’s epistemic trust. The results showed that communicators tuned their messages to the audience’s attitude when they perceived group entitativity and epistemic trust. 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. These results suggest that perceiving a large audience as a group influences the subsequent impressions of electronic word-of-mouth product or service communicators.