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Shared Reality
Shared Reality
What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart
E . T O RY H IG G I N S
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© E. Tory Higgins 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Higgins, E. Tory (Edward Tory), 1946– author.
Title: Shared reality : what makes us strong and tears us apart / E. Tory Higgins.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018061051 | ISBN 9780190948054
Subjects: LCSH: Sharing. | Emotions.
Classification: LCC BF575.S48 H54 2019 | DDC 155.9/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061051
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
I . T H E E M E R G E N C E O F SHA R E D R E A L I T Y
1. Sharing Is Believing 9
2. Childhood Development of Shared Reality: Infants
and Toddlers 29
3. Childhood Development of Shared Reality: Preschoolers
and Schoolers 53
4. The Roots of Human Shared Reality 79
I I . HOW SHA R E D R E A L I T Y M A K E S U S H UM A N
5. What We Feel 107
6. What We Know: It’s More Than Meets the Eye 130
7. Our Sense of Self: Who Am I? How Am I Doing? 159
8. Our Attitudes and Opinions: Experiencing the Subjective
as Objective 179
9. What We Strive For and Value 200
10. How We Strive 223
11. How We Get Along: Bringing Us Together and Tearing
Us Apart 251
Epilogue: It Begins with Shared Relevance 277
References 287
Index 323
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been written without the help and support of
friends, family, colleagues, and teachers who contributed to its development in
many different ways. It began with Wally Lambert at McGill University who
introduced me to the wonders of how language, thought, and society impact
one another. I now realize that Wally’s groundbreaking approach to bilingual
education was his recognition that learning another language was not so much
about learning the grammar or syntax of the new language but, instead, was
about wanting to share the feelings, thoughts, and concerns of that new lan-
guage community. After graduating, I went to London School of Economics
and Political Science where I studied with Norman Hotopf. Norman’s version
of language, thought, and society was a blend of his doctoral advisor, Bertrand
Russell, and his postdoctoral advisor, Frederick Bartlett. Bartlett, especially, was
a pioneer in studying shared reality by showing how information is modified
when it is shared with others. As a doctoral student in the Department of Social
Psychology at Columbia, I worked with Bob Krauss who was a groundbreaker
in studying the development of communication. Inspired by his research, my
doctoral dissertation examined developmental and social class differences in
communication. It was my first research on language, thought, and society.
After leaving Columbia, I began working more on language and thought
than language, thought, and society. It took me awhile to take seriously
again the society part. But looking back, I recognize how much I was
influenced by Wally, Norman, and Bob. I am very grateful to them.
I am also enormously grateful to Gerald Echterhoff. Gerald was a post-
doctoral student with Bob Krauss when I returned to Columbia as a faculty
member. I had just written a paper reviewing my previous work on com-
munication where, for the first time, I referred to what was happening in
my studies as communicators’ creating a shared reality with their audience.
Gerald asked me if I had done any new research testing this “shared reality”
idea. I told him that I had not. He then asked me if I would be interested
in working together on this idea. And, as they say, the rest is history. His
contributions over more than a decade, along with his graduate students
(especially René Kopietz), have been essential to understanding how shared
reality works in interpersonal communication. Thanks, Gerald.
I am also enormously grateful to John Levine. Again, from the beginning,
John was excited about the idea of shared reality. We had many wonderful
conversations about the nature of shared reality. Not surprisingly, given John’s
historical contributions to the social psychology of groups, John taught me
viii Acknowledgments
“Wish you were here!” Most of us are familiar with this typical message on a
picture postcard showing something like a beach at sunset. It first appeared
on postcards at the end of the 19th century, and it quickly became ubiqui-
tous. Why? Sometimes the message begins with “having a wonderful time”
and then “wish you were here,” suggesting that I wish you could also be
having a wonderful time enjoying this beach at sunset. But I think there is
more to it than that. In my own experience of “wish you were here,” I wish
that my partner or close friend was with me because my experience would
be so much better, so much more wonderful. My experience doesn’t seem
quite real without sharing it with someone close to me. For my experience
to be really real, I need my partner or friend to experience it with me. To be
real, I need a shared reality. And this need of mine is only human. Indeed, it
makes us human.
This book takes a different perspective on the age-old question of what
makes us human. Historically, the answer to what makes us human, what
makes us deal with the world in the ways we do, has been that we have a
different kind of intelligence than other animals. A very different answer
to what makes us human is provided in this book. Yes, humans have a dif-
ferent kind of intelligence than other animals, but we also have a different
kind of motivation. The human motivation for shared reality—the motiva-
tion to share our feelings, thoughts, and concerns with others—is unique
to humans. It is captured in “I wish you were here.” When we are away
from others close to us, we wish that we could share our experiences with
them. When taking a walk with others, we point to something to draw our
companion’s attention to it, just to share what we find interesting. When
talking to close friends, we tailor or adjust what we say about something
to match their feelings and thoughts about it to have a shared reality with
them. And when we do share our experiences with others, what is shared
becomes more real. Indeed, the shared reality becomes the truth, the whole
2 Introduction
truth, and nothing but the truth, even when, as with our tailored messages,
the truth is modified to create a shared reality.
Like human intelligence, human motivation is also special, and by “spe-
cial,” I mean remarkable. Humans are unique in wanting others to share
their feelings, beliefs, and concerns. Like the sunset on the beach, we want
to experience that what is relevant to us about the world—what objects,
events, and issues are worthy of attention—is also relevant to others. And
what we share with others is what we experience to be real. It is a shared
reality. This book tells the story of this remarkable human motivation that
defines who we are. It describes how this motivation makes us strong. It
also describes how this motivation can tear us apart.
The story of our motivation to share reality with others is a story that we
all need to know because this human motivation has both essential benefits
and major costs for humans. On the upside, our motivation to create shared
reality with others is critical for how we coordinate, cooperate, and relate
to one another in our families, friendships, and communities. We even see
this motivation in the behavior of human infants. They want to share with
us what they find interesting and relevant by pointing to it and trying to
get us to pay attention to it and appreciate that it is worthy of attention.
They also look to us (i.e., check with us) to learn whether they should re-
spond positively or negatively to some event or object. Historically, creating
shared realities has been an essential part of the societies and cultures that
humans have developed. It is the motivation for learning from others what
they know that we do not and for teaching others what we know that they
do not. It provides our basic connection to others and our feeling of belong-
ingness with others. By creating shared realities with others, we come to
know the truth about the world, that is, what is real about the world. Shared
realities make the world meaningful to us. These benefits from shared re-
ality are basic to who we are as humans.
Our motivation to share reality with others, however, also has major
costs for humans. When we create shared realities with our fellow group
members, these shared realities become the truth about what to feel and
what to believe, and any other group to which we do not belong that has dif-
ferent feelings and beliefs about the world—whether it is a different ethnic
group, religious group, or political group—is a group we distrust and even
fear. They don’t have “alternative facts” or simply a different viewpoint: They
have false beliefs and dangerous feelings. We are right and they are wrong,
and they must not be allowed to prevail in the marketplace of ideas. In this
Introduction 3
way, our motivation to create shared realities with in-group others but not
out-group others leads to intergroup hatreds and conflicts from which
millions of people have died. This major downside of shared reality is seen
in current political conflicts that have poisoned public discourse and caused
great suffering around the world.
Thus, our motivation to create shared reality with others not only reflects
the best of us. It also reflects the worst of us. There is not a separate human
motivation that is good and another that is bad. There is a singular motiva-
tion to share reality that has both upsides (helping in-group members) and
downsides (attacking out-group members). Given this, it is important that
we all know what exactly this motivation is and understand how it works
and how it plays out in our everyday lives. The purpose of this book is to
tell this story of the human motivation to create shared reality with others.
The shared reality story of human motivation is very different than the
usual answer to the question, “What makes us human?” The usual answer
highlights our intelligence, with our unique use of language often being
cited as the prime example of our special superior intelligence. The dif-
ferent versions of this answer are typically some form of “Yay us!” After all,
we’re only human. When it comes to motivation, however, humans are not
so sure that our motivations are superior to those of other species. Indeed,
psychologists and other scientists have historically argued that our basic
motives are the same as those of many other animals, including rats and
pigeons. And, unlike our intelligence, we are not always proud of our mo-
tivation. We are not proud of aggression toward members of our own spe-
cies, including killing innocent children. When this happens, you don’t hear
“Yay us!” Perhaps that’s why we don’t want to talk about motivation as what
makes us human.
The potential downside of human motivation highlights another differ-
ence between the shared reality version of the story and the human intel-
ligence version of the story. Discussions of how human intelligence differs
from the intelligence of other animals typically emphasize the advantages
we derive from our higher intelligence, such as our use of superior tools,
our laws and ethical principles, our different forms of art, and our use of
language. We even decided to distinguish our species from other species
in the genus “Homo” (and other hominids) by calling ourselves “Homo sa-
piens”—Latin for “wise man.”
But should it be our special intelligence that we emphasize when trying
to understand what makes us human? That isn’t clear. After all, it is not clear
4 Introduction
that when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals evolved from a common an-
cestor about half a million years ago, Homo sapiens were more intelligent
than Neanderthals. It has been suggested that we might even have been less
intelligent (considering brain size, for instance). Something other than in-
telligence, then, could have given us an advantage. And whatever that was—
and I suggest that it could be the ways in which we create shared realities
with others—it was the difference between our surviving as a species while
all other hominids, including Neanderthals, did not. It was, and is, a critical
part of who we are and why we survived. Rather than just our intelligence,
our motivation to create shared realities with others was critical for how we
cooperated and coordinated with each other in uniquely human ways. As
we will see, infant human children in many ways are less intelligent than
adult chimpanzees, but they want to share with others what they find rele-
vant and interesting in the world in a way that chimpanzees do not.
In addition, if we are so intelligent and wise, and our intelligence and
wisdom are such good things, why do we as members of different religious
or political groups struggle simply to get along with each other or even
listen to each other? Why do we as individuals suffer from so much depres-
sion and anxiety? What is the superior intelligence part of the human story
not telling us about what it means to be human? And if there is something
else, basic to who we are, that explains our downsides as well as our upsides,
then we need to identify it and understand how it works. Only then can
we do something to make our human lives better. And there is something
else: our motivation to create shared realities with others. This motivation
reflects the best of us and the worst of us. It has led to great cultural achieve-
ment and to great wars and to self-sacrifice to save the children of others
and to self-sacrifice to kill the children of others (think suicide bombers).
When I say that the motivation to create shared realities with others is a
critical part of the story of being human, I am arguing that it is a universal
human motivation that underlies what we feel, what we believe, what we
strive for, and how we relate to one another in ways that make us different
from any other animal. And this shared reality story about being human,
this motivational story, is not the same story as saying that humans have
greater intelligence than other animals. Imagine that there are two animals
from the same family sitting together and looking around. If they are an-
imals that have arms and can make sounds, it does not take high intelli-
gence for one of them to raise its arm and point at something it sees while
uttering a sound to attract the attention of the other. Even six-month-old
Introduction 5
human infants do this. They notice something that they find interesting and
then point to it while uttering something like “Ooh ooh!” It doesn’t take an
Einstein to do that. As far as intelligence goes, it’s not that impressive. But
here’s the point. Other primates don’t do that. They don’t try to create joint
attention to something just because they find it interesting. It’s not that they
can’t do the pointing and utter something to draw attention to what they are
looking at. It’s just that they are not motivated to do that. Human infants
want to share with another what they find interesting. For other primates,
this simply doesn’t matter. It is a difference in motivation, not a difference
in intelligence.
What you might also have noticed about this example is that what
human infants are doing here is not about language either. Uttering “Ooh
ooh!” is not language. In fact, infants can and do get caretakers to look at
what they find interesting without uttering anything at all, as when my in-
fant daughter would grab my shirt and point excitedly at something while
checking whether I was looking in the same direction. And when I did and
then smiled, she would smile broadly. When human infants share their in-
terest in things with others during the first year, it is part of a more general
phase in which they share feelings with others, which includes learning
from others what to feel positive about and what to feel negative about. It
is the beginning of human children creating shared realities with others
in ways that do not happen with other animals. It is so common among
human infants that it can be taken for granted. No big deal. But it is a big
deal because it makes us human and not some other animal. And it begins
early on in children’s development, well before symbolic development or
other manifestations of higher intelligence.
One of my inspirations for writing this book is to tell the story of how
children develop as humans by acquiring new forms of shared reality with
others (Chapters 2 and 3). As infants grow (6–12 months), they begin to
share feelings with their caretakers, such as sharing their excitement about
something they see by pointing to it. Then as toddlers (18–24 months),
they share social practices, such as sharing with others the eating practices
of their community. Next, as older preschoolers (3–5 years), they share
the goals and standards that their significant others have for them, such
as sharing with their parents what they should try to achieve. In the final
phase of shared reality development, school-aged children (9–13 years)
learn social roles and coordinate their roles with others who are fulfilling
complementary roles, such as sharing with other members of a sports
6 Introduction
team what is expected of those playing the different roles. Each of these
new forms of shared reality has significant consequences for what children
do and how they do it. Children benefit greatly from acquiring these new
forms of shared reality, but there are potential costs as well—the trade-offs
of being human.
In addition to the story of shared reality during childhood development,
there is also the story of what happened in the evolution of our species. This
story is important because it sheds light on where our motivation to create
shared reality with others came from. For example, I discuss in Chapter 4
how our being bipedal contributed to our newborns being unusually weak
at birth and how the exceptionally long period of dependency for human
children could have created an evolutionary selection pressure on human
children to share the feelings, thoughts, and concerns with their caretakers
to receive the help they needed to survive.
How does the development of shared reality in humans play out in eve-
ryday life? This is the primary focus of the book. I will describe how shared
reality impacts our being human, as revealed in what we feel (Chapter 5),
what we know (Chapter 6), our sense of self (Chapter 7), what we strive for
and value and how we strive (Chapters 8 and 9, respectively), our attitudes
and opinions (Chapter 10), and how we get along (Chapter 11). I begin with
how adults use interpersonal communication to create shared realities
with others (Chapter 1). I begin with this part of the story because inter-
personal communication is basic to how humans create shared reality with
each other and because it clearly demonstrates how our shared realities,
whether actually true or not, are treated as the truth. During our day-to-
day interactions with others, we communicate to them about what is hap-
pening in the world, and when we do, we tailor or adjust what we say to
them to match their feelings and thoughts about what is going on. Because
we tailor what we say to our communication partners to create a shared re-
ality with them, what we say is often distorted or biased. But it is this shared
reality that is now treated as the truth. It becomes what we believe and
what we remember. Our shared realities become the world we live in and
know: Sharing is believing. And with tight networks of people talking just to
each other, these shared realities are the DNA of our social bubbles.
PART I
THE E ME RGE NCE OF
SHA R E D R E A L I T Y
1
Sharing Is Believing
You go to a party and meet a guy named Michael for the first time. During
the party, you observe how Michael behaves. Later you are talking to a friend
who you know is in the same club as Michael and so you mention that you
met him for the first time at the party. Your friend says, “Oh . . . I don’t really
like Michael very much. What was your impression of him?” If you are like
me—and most people—what you say next will be influenced by knowing
that your friend has a negative impression of Michael. It is likely that what
you say about Michael will move in the evaluative direction of your friend’s
feelings about him. This means characterizing Michael in a more negative
manner than you would have otherwise. And that’s what most of us would
do. The question is: What do we later remember about how Michael actu-
ally behaved at the party? To answer this question, let’s step back and con-
sider what psychology tells us.
Seeing is believing. That’s what we’re told—and have been told for a very
long time. It is a saying that goes back hundreds of years. It argues that only
evidence that is physical or concrete can ever be truly convincing to us.
Within social psychology, Leon Festinger, a father of modern social psy-
chology, distinguished between physical reality, which is information about
something in the world that is provided by our own physical experience of
that thing, and social reality, which is information about something in the
world that is provided by other people.1
Consistent with “seeing is believing,” Festinger argued that physical re-
ality trumps social reality. Social reality can matter, but only when the in-
formation from physical reality is unclear. Much of the time, our own
observations would be our primary source of information. If we person-
ally observed something, like Michael’s behaviors at the party, then that is
the truth about it. Only when we are uncertain about what we observed do
we check with others about how we should characterize it. Yes, in trying to
be polite on some topic or to be sensitive to someone’s feelings on a topic,
like our friend’s impression of Michael, we might describe what happened
differently to match that person’s opinion on the topic. We might say
10 The Emergence of Shared Reality
PALLÓS
Ki meri azt mondani még, hogy van csoda, amely három napig
tart? Nincs ilyen. A csoda ma már legföljebb a reggeli lapoktól az esti
lapokig, s azután, ha igen nagy csoda, még az esti lapoktól a reggeli
lapokig tud eltartani. Az ördög sem emlékszik már a Pallós Ignác
ügyére; az emberek kivélekedték és kivezércikkezték magukat
annak idején és Pallós Ignácról kevés szó esik már ebben az
életben. Talán sohasem szellőztetik azt a nagy szennyest, amit a
Pallós ügye körül sikerült hirtelen ládába zárni. A ládát bezárták és
ráültek a tetejére hivatalosan. Ami közéleti tanuság volt a Pallós
Ignác esetében, azt nem engedték ki a ládából. Emlékeztetőül
annyit, hogy Pallós Ignác, aki irni, olvasni alig tudott, milliós
vállalkozóvá tudott lenni, azoknak a kegyelméből, akik keresni
akartak rajta. Aztán Pallósnak rosszul ment sora és több millió
értékü részvényt hamisitott. Akkor lefülelték és Pallós ki akarta nyitni
a száját, hogy elmondja, kit mindenkit vesztegetett meg ő addig,
amig milliomos volt.
Tetszenek emlékezni ama kenetes beszédekre, amiket a
rendőrségen Pallós Ignáchoz intéztek?
– Pallós, maga szálljon magába, maga valjon töredelmesen
Pallós, de ne próbáljon senkit az ügybe belekeverni, Pallós, mert
maga azzal ugysem használ magának, Pallós!
Mindenki tudja, hogy nincs jogegyenlőség e világon, s hogy a
hatmilliós eseteket másként kezelik, mint a nyolcvankrajcáros
csirkelopásokat. De nem volna szabad ilyen élesen dokumentálni ezt
a különbséget. Hadd higyjék legalább a közemberek, a
jogszolgáltatás szegény birkanyája, hogy az igazságnak valóban be
van kötve a szeme, s hogy mérleget tart a kezében. Hadd higyjék,
ugysem igaz. S a másik, a népmesebeli felfogás sem teljes, hogy az
igazság vak. Dehogy az. Mindebből csak annyi igaz, hogy az
Igazság akkor hunyja be a szemét, mikor akarja és a saját mérlegén,
amit ugy ismer, mint a kis szatócs az ő mérlegnek elnevezett két
rézserpenyőjét, ugy mér, ahogy neki tetszik. A Pallós-magaszálljon-
magába kezdetü történet ennek a kormányozható
szembehunyásnak egyik legkétségbeejtőbb esete. Hiszen azt is
tudta mindenki, hogy azt a nagy apparátusos részvénycsalást, amit
Pallós Ignác követett el, nem lehet máról holnapra, egy hónapos-
szobában végrehajtani. Mindamellett az igazság nem akart több
büntársat, annál a két földhözragadt alkalmazottnál, a Pallós két
hivatalnokánál, akik igazán nem szaladhattak rendőrökhöz, biróhoz,
mikor a gazdájukkal, vagy a gazdájuk parancsára, vagy a gazdájuk
kedvéért csaltak. Ha szaladtak volna, még baj érhette volna őket. Ez
nem tulzás kérem. Ha a virágzó milliomos Pallós Ignácot feljelentik
alkalmazottai, a Pallós kijárói még becsukatják a tisztesség
bacillusával fertőzött embereket. Könnyen megtörténik az ilyesmi.
Ó, mennyire másként megy ez, ha Péter ellop egy kenyérsarkot a
péktől! Még a fogházbeli álmát is kilesik, s ha álmában egy nevet
susogott, azonnal utánajárnak, hogy nincs-e része a kiejtett név
gazdájának a kenyérsark ellopásában s még árpacukrot is hajlandók
adni Péternek, ha lesz olyan kedves még néhány nevet kiejteni.
És a hatmilliós vádlott hallgasson? Persze. Mert a nevek, amiket
ő kiejtene, kényelmetlen nevek, józengésü nevek, közszereplők
nevei. A hatmilliós vádlott egyszerre lépjen elő Krisztussá és a maga
bőre árán mentsen meg mindenkit, ha már ő maga ugysem
menekedhetik. Züllött kis filozófia ez, abban a pillanatban, mikor az
igazságszolgáltatás alkalmazza. És pedig annál züllöttebb, mennél
emberibb és igazságosabb a való-életben. Mert mi, akik kivül állunk
s akik nem a törvénykönyvvel kezünkben filozofálunk, elmondhatjuk:
– Mért menjen tönkre egy csomó ember, ha ebből a vádlottnak
ugysincs haszna?
De a rendőrség és a vizsgálóbiró nem állhatnak ezen az alapon.
Állhatnának, ha mindig állanának rajta. De, ha váci-uti tüntetések
vannak, melynek szereplői rongyos munkásasszonyok és egyéb kis
piszok emberek, akkor: fiat justitia, pereat mundus. Mert akkor a
justitia néhány hamis detektiv-vallomás, a mundus: egypár
toprongyos, aki nem tud segiteni magán. Ha ellenben Pallós Ignác
csak a minisztériumok felé fordulva tudna egy jó vallomást tenni,
akkor legyünk emberségesek és kezdődik a hallja-maga-Pallós nevü
fentebb ismertetett mondás.
Ez a társadalom megtisztitása? Könyörgünk alássan.
– Ugyan! – mondja ez alkalommal rendőrség és vizsgálóbiró
velem együtt, – az nem komoly dolog.
Valóban nem az. A társadalmat, egyáltalán nem lehet igy
megtisztitani. De nem is kell; az embert, ha cukorbeteg, nem
operálják. Mert az orvostudománynak mindegy, s a betegnek is
mindegy, hogy az operációba hal-e bele a beteg, vagy magába a
betegségbe.
KÉZ A ZSEBBEN
A KALAUZ
AZ ÁTMENETI VÁROS
HELYET, HELYET
RÉGISÉGEK
ÉS MOST VILÁGVÁROS?
Ó, IDŐ!