Humans are fundamentally motivated to create a sense of shared reality—the perceived commonality of inner states (feeling, beliefs, and concerns about the world) with other people. This shared reality establishes a sense of both social connection and understanding the world. Research on shared reality has burgeoned in recent decades. We first review evidence for a basic building block of shared-reality creation: sharing-is-believing, whereby communicators tune their descriptions to align with their communication partner’s attitude about something, which in turn shapes their recall. Next, we describe recent developments moving beyond this basic building block to explore generalized shared reality about the world at large, which promotes interpersonal closeness and epistemic certainty. Together, this body of work exemplifies the synergy between relational and epistemic motives. Finally, we discuss the potential for another form of shared reality—shared relevance—to bridge disparate realities.

人类从根本上具有创造共同现实感的动力，即与其他人的内在状态（感觉，信仰和对世界的关注）的感知共性。这种共同的现实建立了社会联系和对世界的了解。近几十年来，关于共享现实的研究蓬勃发展。我们首先回顾一下共享现实创造的基本构建基础的证据：“共享就是信念”，通过这种交流，传播者可以调整其描述，以使其交流伙伴对某些事情的态度与之相吻合，进而影响他们的回忆。接下来，我们将描述超越此基本构建模块的最新发展，以探索广义的在整个世界上共享现实，这促进了人与人之间的亲密关系和认知确定性。总之，这项工作体现了关系动机和认知动机之间的协同作用。最后，我们讨论了另一种形式的共享现实-共享相关性-弥合不同现实的可能性。