A unifying theory of shared reality

A core element of the human social experience is sharing one’s subjective reality with others and many scholars have therefore theorized about, and empirically studied the psychology of shared reality. However, over the last couple of decades different disciplines have started to take increasingly different theoretical approaches to what it means for a reality to be shared, leading to conceptual inconsistencies (and thus confusion) within the field. In this paper, we therefore propose a unifying theory of shared reality aimed at streamlining shared reality research across different disciplines. To do so, we first provide a conceptual review of the shared reality literature in different fields. Next, we provide a conceptual analysis of shared reality, resulting in a unifying theory of shared reality containing five core principles. From these core principles, we extract two key hypotheses about the ontogeny and phylogeny of shared reality. We will then review these hypotheses in the light of the literature within the field to create a developmental timeline for the emergence of shared reality in human children, as well as a phylogenetic description of this phenomenon in non-human animals. Finally, some additional implications of the theory are discussed.Author note: The first version of the manuscript is the original MAP, defended on the 25th of April 2019.