Describing something in terms tailored to a listener shifts the speaker's own later memory and judgement toward the version they gave.
Higgins and Rholes had subjects describe a person to an audience known to like or dislike them. The descriptions tuned to the audience, and the speakers' own later recollections of the target shifted the same way. The speaker is thereby persuaded by their own accommodation, without any intention to deceive and without noticing the shift.
In practice
- A manager who softens an assessment for a sensitive listener remembers the assessment as softer a month later.
- A salesperson who has pitched the product a hundred times believes it more than on the first day.
- Standing
- Compare self-perception theory, which supplies the mechanism, and memory conformity, which runs in the other direction.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- What happens to a message after it is sent