CBB / Social Lunch ~ Abdo Elnakouri, PhD ~ Northwestern University

Abdo Elnakouri ~ Northwestern University

Title ~ Goal-Colored Glasses: How Goals and Relationships Shape Our Sense of Reality.

Abstract  ~  How do people decide what is true and real in the world? People’s sense of truth and reality is not constructed in isolation but is instead co-created through shared reality—the experience of shared attitudes and judgments about the world. Yet, little is known about when and with whom people look to share reality. One possibility is that shared reality helps to serve self-regulatory needs—people might look to selectively share reality with instrumental others (those who support their goals). Indeed, I find (N=3131) that people are motivated to share reality with instrumental (vs. non-instrumental) others (Study 1), a dynamic process that is responsive to shifting goal priorities (Study 2) and cultural contexts (Study 3). This motivated process can be adaptive, predicting more goal success (e.g., higher GPA scores; Studies 4-5), but also maladaptive, predicting distortion of truth in the political realm (e.g., value misperceptions; Study 6). I will discuss theoretical implications and future directions.

Bio ~ Abdo Elnakouri is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His program of research explores why people adopt certain worldviews and how worldviews become open to change. To answer these questions, he draws on research from fields that emphasize individual agency (e.g., self-regulation) and interpersonal dynamics (e.g., close relationships), a synergy that offers rich new theoretical insights. He draws on a diverse methodological toolkit to explore these questions, including experimental, dyadic, longitudinal, social network, archival, computational, and behavioral methods.