Fused mind: a generalized shared reality in a two-party relationship.

Rossignac-Milon, M., Bolger, N., Zee, KS, Boothby, EJ, & Higgins, ET (2021) The fused mind: generalized shared reality in two-person relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(4), 882-911. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000266

Commentary

Much of the everyday conversation between close partners and strangers interacting for the first time is about the world outside the relationship, such as music, food, and current events.

The focus of most research on interpersonal relationships to date has been on the way partners perceive each other and their relationships.

I would suggest that one of the key aspects of interpersonal relationships is to develop a sense of a generalized, shared reality of the two parties.

There are nine studies that use mixed methods to research and investigate the unique role of generalized shared reality in interpersonal relationships between both intimate partners and strangers.

Generalized shared reality is hypothesized to predict how people connect with each other and perceive the world around them. We investigate the observable two-way behavioral signatures of generalized shared reality in interpersonal relationships.

Finally, we examine the motivations that support the existing sense of generalized shared reality and assume that couples with a high baseline generalized shared reality show motivation.

Two-way interaction behavior to reaffirm generalized shared reality in the face of experimentally manipulated threats aims to capture an important aspect of the lived subjective experience of human relationships that has not been captured before by identifying unique aspects of everyday interactions