How stereotypes are maintained in communication

In they saying-is-believing post, I said that people tend to adjust their messages to fit their expectations of their audiences' expectations. What if a speaker doesn't know anything specific about their audience? They will tend to adjust their messages to fit general stereotypes.

Consider the following experiment:

Subjects re-tell a story involving a member of a stereotyped group in a 4-person "telephone" chain of story-tellers in which each has no information about the other participants. Because they lack information about their audience, they can't tune their message to a specific audience, but tuning occurs nonetheless. In the experiment, stereotype relevant information becomes more consistent over the communication chain, while stereotype non-relevant information becomes weaker.

The experiment in full is reported in:

Lyons & Kashima 2003. How are stereotypes maintained through communication? The influence of stereotype sharedness. J. Personal Soc. Psychol. 85:989-1005