Rumor Psychology: Social And Organizational Approaches

290 Pages·2006·16.05 MB·English

by  Nicholas Difonzo

Rumor
Psychology
Social and
Organizational
Approaches
Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia
American Psychological Association • Washington, DC
Copyright © 2007 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except as
permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be
reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, including, but not limited to, the process
of scanning and digitization, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by
American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
www.apa.org
To order
APA Order Department
P.O. Box 92984
Washington, DC 20090-2984
Tel: [phone]; Direct: [phone]
Fax: [phone]; TDD/TTY: [phone]
Online: www.apa.org/books/
E-mail: [email protected]
In the U.K., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, copies may be ordered from
American Psychological Association
3 Henrietta Street
Covent Garden, London
WC2E 8LU England
Typeset in Meridien by World Composition Services, Inc., Sterling, VA
Printer: Hamilton Printing, Castleton, NY
Cover Designer: Naylor Design, Washington, DC
Technical/Production Editor: Tiffany L. Klaff
The opinions and statements published are the responsibility of the authors, and such opinions
and statements do not necessarily represent the policies of the American Psychological
Association.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DiFonzo, Nicholas.
Rumor psychology : social and organizational approaches / Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant
Bordia.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59147-426-5
ISBN-10: 1-59147-426-4
1. Rumor. 2. Social psychology. 3. Organizational behavior. I. Bordia, Prashant. II. Title.
HM1241.D54 2007
302.2'4—dc22 2006009552
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record is available from the British Library.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
Dedicated to Mary Josephine DiFonzo and Manjula Bordia.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX
INTRODUCTION 3
1 Defining Rumor 11
2 Forms, Frequency, and Fallout of Rumors 35
3 Psychological Factors in Rumor Spread 69
4 Factors Associated With Belief in Rumor 89
5 Rumor as Sense Making 113
6 Rumor Accuracy: Patterns of Content Change,
Conceptualization, and Overall Accuracy 133
7 Mechanisms Facilitating Rumor Accuracy
and Inaccuracy 159
8 Trust and Organizational Rumor Transmission 185
9 Rumor Management 205
10 Summary, Model, and Research Agenda 229
REFERENCES 261
AUTHOR INDEX 277
SUBJECT INDEX 283
ABOUT THE AUTHORS 291
VII
Acknowledgments
everal people have been especially helpful in the production
of this volume. We are particularly indebted to Ralph L.
Rosnow, our ever-helpful colleague and mentor at Temple
University, a true pioneer in the study of rumor transmis-
sion. We also thank Charles Walker of St. Bonaventure Uni-
versity for his perspicacious advice on chapter 1. We thank
the anonymous corporation, including workers, question-
naire administrators, and management, who participated in
the longitudinal survey described in chapters 2 and 8. Credit
with regard to this project is particularly due to Rob Winter-
korn for his determined—and successful—efforts in data
collection. We thank H. Taylor Buckner and Frederick
Koenig for their comments on chapters 6 and 7. We appreci-
ate comments on a draft of chapter 8 made by Kurt Dirks,
Chip Heath, and Ralph L. Rosnow. We thank Eric K. Foster,
Holly Horn, Frederick Koenig, Mark Pezzo, Charles Walker,
Sarah Wert, and John Yost for consistently stimulating our
thinking about rumor and gossip via the electronic discus-
sion group, [email protected]. The
first author (DiFonzo) acknowledges funding to assist in the
preparation of this volume from two sources at Rochester
Institute of Technology: the College of Liberal Arts Faculty
Education and Development Fund and the Provost's Faculty
Leave Fund. Research reported in chapter 9 was funded
by the Australian Research Council and the University of
Queensland Foundation. We are grateful to collaborators
past and present. We thank Simon Lloyd Restubog and
IX
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bernd Irmer for help at various stages in the preparation of this manu-
script. We thank Emily Leonard, development editor, and Tiffany Klaff,
production editor, in the Books department at the American Psycholog-
ical Association, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful
comments on a draft of this volume.
Rumor
Psychology
Introduction
We are swimming in rumors.
—Manager at a small company facing severe downsizing
Tropical Fantasy Fruit Punch contains a substance that
causes black men to become sterile.
—False rumor circulating in New York City that
caused sales to plummet 70% (Freedman, 1991)
Israel warned 4000 Jews not to report for work at the
World Trade Center on September llth, 2001.
—False rumor circulating among anti-Zionist groups
(Hari, 2002; U.S. Department of State, 2005)
R umors are an enduring feature of social and organizational
landscapes. They attract attention, evoke emotion, incite
involvement, affect attitudes and actions—and they are
ubiquitous. A small example includes the groundless rumors
that McDonald's uses worm meat in its hamburgers
grounded sales in Atlanta (Goggins, 1979). Sober reports
that Paul McCartney was dead were discussed with sadness
and snowballed, even after a photo and interview with a
very much alive McCartney was published in LIFE magazine
(Rosnow, 1991). Office scuttlebutt often eats away at trust—
and feeds on distrust—among organizational members
(DiFonzo, Bordia, & Rosnow, 1994). False rumors that a
Haitian coup leader was to be set free spurred angry riots
that killed 10 people ("10 Die in Haiti," 1991). Seven million
people heard the incorrect claim that Coca-Cola contains
4 R U M OR P S Y C H O L O GY
carcinogens (Kapferer, 1989). Two bizarre and fallacious rumors, wide-
spread in Africa, were that the AIDS virus was developed in a western
laboratory, and that a World Health Organization team inoculated
100,000 Africans with an untested vaccine that caused the continent's
pandemic of AIDS (Lynch, 1989). Harmful or potentially harmful ru-
mors reach the ears of top corporate public relations personnel nearly
once per week on average (DiFonzo & Bordia, 2000). E-mailed
computer-related hoaxes, such as the "Good Times" virus that will
rewrite one's hard drive and the "teddy bear" icon that destroys your
whole system, regularly alarm novice Internet users (Bordia & DiFonzo,
2004; "JDBGMGR.EXE," 2002). The catalog continues in abundance;
rumors flourish, fascinate, and frustrate.
It is not surprising then that the record of scholarly interest in the
psychology of rumor is long and illustrious; for over 7 decades social and
organizational researchers in psychology and sociology have researched
rumor. Some brief highlights we note include the early and substantial
work of Jamuna Prasad (1935) who studied rumors circulating after a
cataclysmic Indian earthquake. Interest in the subject of rumor psychol-
ogy peaked during World War II and rumor researchers included such
well-known social psychologists as Floyd H. Allport, Kurt Back, Dorwin
Cartwright, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and John Thibaut (e.g.,
F. H. Allport & Lepkin, 1945; Back et al, 1950; Festinger et al, 1948;
Schachter & Burdick, 1955). The standard work during this period was
G. W. Allport and Leo J. Postman's The Psychology of Rumor published
in 1947. The eminent Tamotsu Shibutani published the landmark socio-
logical treatise Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor in 1966.
Ralph L. Rosnow and his associates refined the conceptual understand-
ing of rumor and systematically investigated the dynamics of rumor
transmission in the latter decades of the 20th century (e.g., Jaeger,
Anthony, & Rosnow, 1980; Rosnow, 1974, 1980, 1988, 1991; Rosnow,
Esposito, & Gibney, 1988; Rosnow & Fine, 1976; Rosnow & Georgoudi,
1985; Rosnow, Yost, & Esposito, 1986). Other social and organizational
psychologists and sociologists contributed significantly to the body of
knowledge regarding rumor as well during this period (e.g., K. Davis,
1972; Fine, 1992; Kapferer, 1987/1990; Knopf, 1975; Koenig, 1985;
Morin, 1971; Pratkanis & Aronson, 1991; P. A. Turner, 1993; R. H.
Turner & Killian, 1972). And within the past decade, social and organi-
zational psychologists have paid increased attention to this topic (e.g.,
R. S. Baron, David, Brunsman, & Inman, 1997; Bordia & DiFonzo,
2002, 2004, 2005; Bordia, DiFonzo, & Schulz, 2000; Bordia & Rosnow,
1998; DiFonzo & Bordia, 1997, 2002b, 2006, in press; DiFonzo, Bordia,
& Winterkorn, 2003; DiFonzo et al., 1994; Fine, Heath, & Campion-
Vincent, 2005; Fiske, 2004; Heath, Bell, &• Sternberg, 2001; Houmanfar
& Johnson, 2003; Kimmel, 2004a, 2004b; Michelson & Mouly, 2004;