Mud always sticks

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on November 21, 2007  
Filed Under Work Behaviour

Hearsay can be the most reliable source of information about situations with which you have no experience. But when you hear gossip that’s incongruent with a person or incident with which you are familiar, you’d be smart to throw that chitchat out the window in favour of your own direct knowledge, right?

Wrong! A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals we sometimes place so much stock in gossip that we accept it as true even if our own observations and experiences suggest otherwise.

For the study, groups of nine students sat with laptops at a table separated by partitions so their decisions remained anonymous. In each round, the players had to decide whether to give a set amount of money to an assigned, but still anonymous, partner within the group.

The team found that players who read a positive comment about another individual, having no knowledge of that person’s past generosity record, were more likely to hand over cash to that individual. The opposite was true for negative gossip, where players held tight to their money.

They also found that when players were given the record of their partner’s past decisions and the comments from other players, or from the researchers writing as players, they paid more attention to the gossip.

Even when the students had access to the raw data on fellow players’ past decisions, gossip still seemed to influence them. People only saw the gossip, not the past decisions.

The work reveals that we place so much faith in unsupported gossip that we believe it as true even if our own observations and experiences tell us something quite different.

The reason, at its simplest, is that we fear a busybody knows something we don’t about another person. We are predisposed to believe gossip if it fills in the blanks in our knowledge.

Whether gossip is true or untrue, it has a strong manipulative potential that can change the reputation of others.

Australians, who are in the midst of a national election, are currently getting more than their fair share of gossip. The spin doctors are very busy and the gossip (mud/innuendo) is flying thick and fast.

As Joseph Goebbles, Hitler’s propaganda chief during the Nazi regime, once said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.

So, if you are going to tell a lie, you might as well tell a big one, as evidence to the contrary may not have a great effect.

Reference

Sommerfeld, R. D., Krambeck, H., Semmann, D. & Milinski, M. (2007). Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 17435-17440.


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