Audience tuning effects on communicators' memory: the role of the communicator's own initial judgment

Human memory is susceptible to various biases, often resulting from social interaction and communication. One example is the "saying-is-believing" (SIB) effect, where a communicator's memory is evaluatively biased by the previous tuning of messages about a target towards their audience's attitude, an effect explained by the communicator's shared reality creation with the audience. According to previous theorising (Echterhoff & Higgins, 2017), the communicators' initial, audience-independent judgments of a target are also likely to affect the evaluative tone of their subsequent memory. We investigated, for the first time, the role of the communicator's own judgment (OJ) as a possible moderator of the audience-congruent memory bias. Across three studies (total N = 1,070 participants), participants' OJs shaped the evaluative tone of their memory. However, there was no evidence that the audience-congruent recall bias depended on whether participants had initially formed a neutral or a valenced (positive or negative) own judgment of a target person. Hence, the audience-congruent memory bias persisted regardless of communicators' own initial judgments. We discuss implications for the study of memory and social influence. The findings are relevant for everyday life, given that people often talk about topics about which they have already formed their own judgment.