Multiple audience dilemma,
also known as multiple audience problem,is a situation that arises when a singular person or group creates multiple images for themselves to present to separate audiences, and then the audiences meet; creating a need to personify different images of the same self without having others figure out what is happening. This might happen through choosing to act in a specific way to convey a personality that matches both images of the self that both audiences are familiar with, as a way of compromising for both audiences without one or both.
One study conducted in 2000 provides information to support the idea of multiple audience dilemma being flawed. The study proves that the task of entertaining multiple audiences at once is difficult and also shows that most participants were more convinced that they had performed a better job then what was actually portrayed.
The first part of this study, a single person had to portray themselves as either a party animal or a nerd in an isolated interview with two separate individuals and later was asked to maintain both images at once while being interviewed once more by the same people, without revealing to either audience members that the participant was performing. Then, the audience member scored what they thought of the participant after both encounters and the scores were compared afterwards. The participant did the task of portraying themselves while individually being interviewed and in the situation, but they performed better when they only had to think of one audience and how they actually performed was worse than how they felt they handled the situation.
The second study focused on letting a group of five or six individuals become familiar with each other by having them talk to the group while answering questions for five minutes. Once everyone was familiar, the participants had to read an essay assigned to them and choose a keyword out of the assigned five words hidden in the essay, that then must be read to ten or twelve individuals, half being the familiar and the unfamiliar make up the rest of the group.The key of this task is to tell the participant's group what the keyword is, without telling the other group. The familiarized group felt like they would perform better because they knew each other, the results however showed to obvious changes, making both the familiar and unfamiliar groups equal at guessing the keyword. This however is only after knowing a person for a few moments and does not conclude that long term relationships will have the same results, due to learning each other's individual personalities rather than a five-minute familiarization session with a group of strangers.
Politics tend to choose their words wisely in order to avoid any members of a specific party feeling offended and making vague reference to a neutral ground, rather than have a specific stance that might upset many people. This is why there has been controversy over what politicians such as Mitt Romney or Barack Obama stand on values that this country is deeply divided over; health care, equal marriage, and even abortion are all examples of this.
