Gerald Echterhoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 658061 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerald Echterhoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerald |
| FAMILY NAME | Echterhoff |
| SIGNATURE | ECHTERHOFF G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Münster |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7395-5313 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Are co-attention effects on memory limited to group members? A registered conceptual replication and extension of Shteynberg (2010)
Co-attention has been shown to enhance memory. Although this effect has been replicated in different social contexts, its minimal conditions remain unclear. Features of previous experiments have been conducive to collaboration, such as participants completing complementary tasks or experiencing a minimal ingroup manipulation. Consequently, it remains unknown whether co-attention effects on memory reflect a fundamental motivation to represent the …
The Pathway Model of Radicalization 2.0
If you agree with me, it must be true”
A scarcely studied route to shared reality is the social verification of one's impressions, a process that should promote impression consolidation. We tested this prediction across four experiments ( N = 1342) using a hiring-decision paradigm. Participants evaluated pairs of similarly qualified applicants based on brief descriptions and portrait photos, made hiring decisions alongside a fictitious partner, and received either verification or no v…
Double standards in the treatment of refugees
We tested whether residents of Germany are more willing to help refugees from Ukraine compared to Syria and examined underlying psychological factors (perceptions of similarity, intergroup threat and the association with Islam). Across three experiments (total N = 3,119), a significant pro-Ukrainian preference emerged: Ukrainian refugees (vs. Syrian refugees) were perceived as less threatening (both realistically and symbolically), elicited less …
Audience tuning effects on communicators’ memory
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, Citation20…
Majority residents’ perceptions of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ refugees
Migrants who flee their home country for economic (vs. political) reasons often elicit more negative responses in receiving countries. We examined psychological processes underlying this flight‐reason bias, focusing on majority residents’ perceptions of migration circumstances and their emotional responses. In three preregistered studies (total N = 1394), participants read texts about an individual refugee (Studies 1 and 2) or groups of refugees …
The role of target‐specific shared reality in interpersonal interactions and protective health behaviours
Shared reality—the experience of sharing common inner states (e.g. feelings, beliefs) with other people about a given topic or target—is a ubiquitous human experience. With research on the construct of shared reality burgeoning in various domains, we examined a fundamental, yet understudied topic: the role of experiencing shared reality about a target in real‐time conversations and real‐world contexts. Across five studies conducted in various con…
Benefits of collaborative remembering in older and younger couples
We experimentally explored whether and how conversation dynamics would benefit collaborative remembering in intimate couples over time. To this end, we ran a study with a three-factor mixed design with relationship type (couples vs. strangers) and age (older adults vs. younger adults) as between-participants variables, and remembering condition (collaborative vs. individual) as a within-participants variable. Thirty pairs of intimate couples (fif…
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften für Bachelor
Dieses Bachelor-Lehrbuch präsentiert die Forschungsmethoden kompakt und verständlich. Es enthält viele Beispiele, Definitionen, Lernziele und Fragen
Improving Attitudes Toward Psychotherapy in Residents and Syrian Refugees in Germany
Syrian refugees underutilize mental health services in Western receiving countries, which is partly attributable to negative attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help (APPH) and denial of the need for psychological help (DNPH). Interventions tailored to culture-specific characteristics of Syrian refugees are needed. We tested an intervention that disseminated information about the benefits of psychotherapy via ostensible interview …
Von Verteidigern und Entdeckern
Dieses Buch zeigt, dass der aktuelle Identitätskonflikt mit Gefühlen gesellschaftlicher Marginalisierung und politischer Repräsentation verbunden ist
Refugees' and non‐refugee migrants' regret about migration and confidence in integration
Refugees typically experience stronger migration forcedness and higher migration-related perils (harm, adversities and hardship) than do non-refugee migrants. We explored how refugees' and non-refugee migrants' perceptions of their own forcedness of migration and related perils before and during migration are associated with regret about leaving their country of origin and their confidence in integration. In two studies conducted with refugee and…
Ugandan and British individuals' views of refugees in their countries
Using an exploratory mixed‐methods approach, we examined thoughts concerning refugees reported by participants from a non‐Western country, Uganda, and the United Kingdom (total N = 113). We explored whether, due to various sociocultural, political and geographic differences, critical features of refugee migration (e.g., migration forcedness and migration‐related perils) would be viewed differently by Ugandan and UK participants. An inductive qual…
Psychological Antecedents of Refugee Integration (Pari)
The successful management of refugee immigration, including refugee integration in host societies, requires a sound understanding of underlying psychological processes. We propose the psychological antecedents of refugee integration (PARI) model, highlighting perceived forcedness (i.e., coercion and loss of control from “push” factors) and ensuing perils (risks and potential suffering during migration) as distinctive factors of refugee (vs. volun…
Support for Refugee Integration in West and East Germany
Prior research has reported less favorable attitudes toward and more violent crimes against ethnic out-group members in East (vs. West) Germany. We conducted two pre-registered lost letter studies in West versus East German cities (Study 1, N = 400) and in West versus East German rural areas (Study 2, N = 400). To investigate supportive behavior regarding refugee integration, we manipulated the addressee (refugee-integration vs. immigration-stop …
Special Issue on “The Social Psychology of Forced Migration and Refugee Integration” in the European Journal of Social Psychology
Shared‐Reality Theory
Shared reality is currently understood as the product of the motivated process of experiencing a commonality of inner (mental) states with others about the world. First, an overview is provided about the main theoretical assumptions, including conditions of shared reality that have been proposed in recent theorizing. Second, the intellectual ancestry of the theory is traced back to approaches in three main areas, that is, interpersonal communicat…
Creating shared reality in interpersonal and intergroup communication
We describe research on the creation of shared reality in communication, emphasizing the epistemic processes that allow communicators to achieve confident judgements and evaluations about a communication topic. We distinguish three epistemic inputs: (1) the communicator’s own judgement about the topic (judgement of communicator); (2) the communicator’s perception of the audience’s judgement about the topic (judgement of audience); and (3) the com…
When virtual contact is all you need
In the Internet age, people who feel alone can use online social media to restore a sense of social connectedness. In the present experiment, participants were either excluded or included in Cyberball, a virtual ball‐tossing game. Afterwards, a Facebook icon or a control icon (Flash Player) was shown on the margin of a computer screen during a filler task. In the control condition, excluded (vs. included) participants subsequently expressed great…
The generalization of shared reality
Communicators often tune their message about a target to the audience's attitude toward that target. This tuning can shape a communicator's own evaluation of the target, which reflects the creation of a shared reality with the audience. So far, evidence for shared‐reality creation has been confined to one specific target. In two experiments, we examined whether and when a shared reality would generalize to other targets. In Experiment 1, shared‐r…
Remembering the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany
According to shared-reality theory, the sharing of memories satisfies the need for confident knowledge (an epistemic consequence) and belongingness (a social-affiliative consequence). In two experiments, German participants remembered a public event with collective importance—the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Germany. We examined whether inducing perceptions of sharedness increases confidence in one’s …
The interplay of oxytocin and collectivistic orientation shields against negative effects of ostracism
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften für Bachelor
Remembering in Conversations
People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational re…
Looking at the actor's face
Creating Shared Memories in Conversation
William Hirst and Gerald Echterhoff Creating Shared Memories in Conversation: Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory PROBLEMS OF MEMORY ARE SALIENT IN TODAY'S WORLD: STRUGGLES BY present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the form er com m unist regimes.' In each instance, at stake is the form a collective memor…
Audience-tuning effects on memory
After tuning to an audience, communicators' own memories for the topic often reflect the biased view expressed in their messages. Three studies examined explanations for this bias. Memories for a target person were biased when feedback signaled the audience's successful identification of the target but not after failed identification (Experiment 1). Whereas communicators tuning to an in-group audience exhibited the bias, communicators tuning to a…
Talking about visually perceived events
Communicators' tuning of a message about a social target to their audience's evaluation can shape their representation of the target. This audience‐tuning effect has been demonstrated with ambiguous text passages as input material. We examined whether the effect also occurs when communicators learn about the target's behaviours from visual (nonverbal) input material. In Experiment 1, participants watched a soundless video depicting ambiguous beha…
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften für Bachelor
Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory
After tuning messages to their audience's attitude, communicators' subsequent memories for the topic are often biased toward their audience-congruent messages. In the context of personnel assessment in an organization, we examined the role of audience characteristics in this audience-tuning effect. Student communicators tuned their description of an employee to either an equal-status audience (a student temp) or a higher-status audience (a compan…
Refugees' and non‐refugee migrants' regret about migration and confidence in integration
Refugees typically experience stronger migration forcedness and higher migration-related perils (harm, adversities and hardship) than do non-refugee migrants. We explored how refugees' and non-refugee migrants' perceptions of their own forcedness of migration and related perils before and during migration are associated with regret about leaving their country of origin and their confidence in integration. In two studies conducted with refugee and…
When virtual contact is all you need
In the Internet age, people who feel alone can use online social media to restore a sense of social connectedness. In the present experiment, participants were either excluded or included in Cyberball, a virtual ball‐tossing game. Afterwards, a Facebook icon or a control icon (Flash Player) was shown on the margin of a computer screen during a filler task. In the control condition, excluded (vs. included) participants subsequently expressed great…
Social Influence on Memory
Special Issue on “The Social Psychology of Forced Migration and Refugee Integration” in the European Journal of Social Psychology
The generalization of shared reality
Communicators often tune their message about a target to the audience's attitude toward that target. This tuning can shape a communicator's own evaluation of the target, which reflects the creation of a shared reality with the audience. So far, evidence for shared‐reality creation has been confined to one specific target. In two experiments, we examined whether and when a shared reality would generalize to other targets. In Experiment 1, shared‐r…
Distress in Response to Infidelities Committed by the Partners of Close Others 1It is journal policy that submissions coauthored by a current editor are handled by a guest editor. We thank Rainer Bans…
To test rival explanations for sex differences in distress over sexual vs. emotional infidelity, evolutionary psychologists have studied people’s reactions to the infidelity suffered by close relatives, claiming that sex-of-target effects would support an evolutionary explanation but refute a sociocultural explanation. This paradigm was extended by comparing genetically related and unrelated targets in two cultures. Students (N = 566) in Greece a…
Audience tuning effects on communicators’ memory
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, Citation20…
The role of target‐specific shared reality in interpersonal interactions and protective health behaviours
Shared reality—the experience of sharing common inner states (e.g. feelings, beliefs) with other people about a given topic or target—is a ubiquitous human experience. With research on the construct of shared reality burgeoning in various domains, we examined a fundamental, yet understudied topic: the role of experiencing shared reality about a target in real‐time conversations and real‐world contexts. Across five studies conducted in various con…
Looking at the actor's face
Audience-Congruent Biases in Eyewitness Memory and Judgment
In studies on biased eyewitness memory, the biasing information about the witnessed event is typically detailed and specific. We investigated the influence of global biasing information, such as a co-witness' impression of a suspect. Student participants watched a video depicting a bar-brawl involving a male target person. After retelling the incident to a generic fellow student who presumably disliked (vs. liked) the target person, participants …
Audience-tuning effects on memory
After tuning to an audience, communicators' own memories for the topic often reflect the biased view expressed in their messages. Three studies examined explanations for this bias. Memories for a target person were biased when feedback signaled the audience's successful identification of the target but not after failed identification (Experiment 1). Whereas communicators tuning to an in-group audience exhibited the bias, communicators tuning to a…
Effects of communication on social knowledge
After communicators have tuned their description of another person's behaviors to suit their audience's attitude toward that person, their subsequent memory of the target person's behaviors is often evaluatively biased in the direction of the audience's attitude. Existing research, which has mainly focused on communication with individuals as the audience, indicates two conditions for the occurrence of this audience‐congruent memory bias: (a) the…
Language and Memory
Creating Shared Memories in Conversation
William Hirst and Gerald Echterhoff Creating Shared Memories in Conversation: Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory PROBLEMS OF MEMORY ARE SALIENT IN TODAY'S WORLD: STRUGGLES BY present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the form er com m unist regimes.' In each instance, at stake is the form a collective memor…
Shared Reality
Humans have a fundamental need to experience a shared reality with others. We present a new conceptualization of shared reality based on four conditions. We posit (a) that shared reality involves a (subjectively perceived) commonality of individuals' inner states (not just observable behaviors); (b) that shared reality is about some target referent; (c) that for a shared reality to occur, the commonality of inner states must be appropriately moti…
Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory
After tuning messages to their audience's attitude, communicators' subsequent memories for the topic are often biased toward their audience-congruent messages. In the context of personnel assessment in an organization, we examined the role of audience characteristics in this audience-tuning effect. Student communicators tuned their description of an employee to either an equal-status audience (a student temp) or a higher-status audience (a compan…
Social Influence on Memory
Audience-Congruent Biases in Eyewitness Memory and Judgment
In studies on biased eyewitness memory, the biasing information about the witnessed event is typically detailed and specific. We investigated the influence of global biasing information, such as a co-witness' impression of a suspect. Student participants watched a video depicting a bar-brawl involving a male target person. After retelling the incident to a generic fellow student who presumably disliked (vs. liked) the target person, participants …
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften - Für Bachelor
Distress in Response to Infidelities Committed by the Partners of Close Others 1It is journal policy that submissions coauthored by a current editor are handled by a guest editor. We thank Rainer Bans…
To test rival explanations for sex differences in distress over sexual vs. emotional infidelity, evolutionary psychologists have studied people’s reactions to the infidelity suffered by close relatives, claiming that sex-of-target effects would support an evolutionary explanation but refute a sociocultural explanation. This paradigm was extended by comparing genetically related and unrelated targets in two cultures. Students (N = 566) in Greece a…
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften für Bachelor
The pervasiveness of memory
The article by Jens Brockmeier (2010) provides a multifaceted, well-written, and thought-provoking synopsis of challenges faced by the study of memory. There are several critical issues and unwarranted conclusions associated with key claims of the article. First of all, the author’s criticism of the archival notion of memory is well made but falls short of taking into account long-standing debates and conceptual developments in the psychology of …
Talking about visually perceived events
Communicators' tuning of a message about a social target to their audience's evaluation can shape their representation of the target. This audience‐tuning effect has been demonstrated with ambiguous text passages as input material. We examined whether the effect also occurs when communicators learn about the target's behaviours from visual (nonverbal) input material. In Experiment 1, participants watched a soundless video depicting ambiguous beha…
Remembering in Conversations
People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational re…
Looking at the actor's face
Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften für Bachelor
Remembering the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany
According to shared-reality theory, the sharing of memories satisfies the need for confident knowledge (an epistemic consequence) and belongingness (a social-affiliative consequence). In two experiments, German participants remembered a public event with collective importance—the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Germany. We examined whether inducing perceptions of sharedness increases confidence in one’s …
The interplay of oxytocin and collectivistic orientation shields against negative effects of ostracism
When virtual contact is all you need
In the Internet age, people who feel alone can use online social media to restore a sense of social connectedness. In the present experiment, participants were either excluded or included in Cyberball, a virtual ball‐tossing game. Afterwards, a Facebook icon or a control icon (Flash Player) was shown on the margin of a computer screen during a filler task. In the control condition, excluded (vs. included) participants subsequently expressed great…
The generalization of shared reality
Communicators often tune their message about a target to the audience's attitude toward that target. This tuning can shape a communicator's own evaluation of the target, which reflects the creation of a shared reality with the audience. So far, evidence for shared‐reality creation has been confined to one specific target. In two experiments, we examined whether and when a shared reality would generalize to other targets. In Experiment 1, shared‐r…
Shared‐Reality Theory
Shared reality is currently understood as the product of the motivated process of experiencing a commonality of inner (mental) states with others about the world. First, an overview is provided about the main theoretical assumptions, including conditions of shared reality that have been proposed in recent theorizing. Second, the intellectual ancestry of the theory is traced back to approaches in three main areas, that is, interpersonal communicat…
Creating shared reality in interpersonal and intergroup communication
We describe research on the creation of shared reality in communication, emphasizing the epistemic processes that allow communicators to achieve confident judgements and evaluations about a communication topic. We distinguish three epistemic inputs: (1) the communicator’s own judgement about the topic (judgement of communicator); (2) the communicator’s perception of the audience’s judgement about the topic (judgement of audience); and (3) the com…
Special Issue on “The Social Psychology of Forced Migration and Refugee Integration” in the European Journal of Social Psychology
Psychological Antecedents of Refugee Integration (Pari)
The successful management of refugee immigration, including refugee integration in host societies, requires a sound understanding of underlying psychological processes. We propose the psychological antecedents of refugee integration (PARI) model, highlighting perceived forcedness (i.e., coercion and loss of control from “push” factors) and ensuing perils (risks and potential suffering during migration) as distinctive factors of refugee (vs. volun…
Support for Refugee Integration in West and East Germany
Prior research has reported less favorable attitudes toward and more violent crimes against ethnic out-group members in East (vs. West) Germany. We conducted two pre-registered lost letter studies in West versus East German cities (Study 1, N = 400) and in West versus East German rural areas (Study 2, N = 400). To investigate supportive behavior regarding refugee integration, we manipulated the addressee (refugee-integration vs. immigration-stop …
Psychology (28 works) · Social Psychology (23 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Memory Processes and Influences (10 works) · Cognitive science (8 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Recall (7 works)