How do you fight a rumour?

English Football is littered with them. Tevez out? Rooney to leave Manchester United? Hughton to be sacked? Most (as we know) are rubbish and only a tiny percentage turn out to be the real deal.

All of which means we were delighted when we stumbled on this excellent piece of analysis from America in 'how to fight a rumour'.

For anyone who has ever worried about the power of a vicious rumour, Barack Obama's strategy during his election campaign must have seemed almost bizarre. Buffeted by rumours about his religion, his upbringing, and controversial statements made by his wife, Obama launched Fight the Smears, a website that lists every well-travelled false rumour about the candidate, alongside rebuttals and explanations for how the rumours arose.

Fighting rumours by publicising them in vivid, high-profile locations is, to say the least, a surprising tactic. It's hard to imagine someone victimised by workplace rumours summarizing them and posting them on the lunchroom wall. The conventional wisdom about rumours is to take the high road and not respond.

Why would anyone want to broadcast negative claims about themselves?

And yet new research into the science of rumours suggests Obama's approach may be a sounder strategy - and the reasons why it makes sense suggest that we misunderstand both how rumours work and why they exist. Rumours, it turns out, are driven by real curiosity and the desire to know more information. Even negative rumours aren't just scurrilous or prurient - they often serve as glue for people's social networks. And although it seems counterintuitive, these facts about rumour suggest that, often, the best way to help stem a rumour is to spread it. The idea of "not dignifying a rumour with a response" reflects a deep misunderstanding of what rumours are, how they are fuelled, and what purposes they serve in society.

"Rumours that involve negative outcomes tend to start and spread more easily than ones that involve positive outcomes."

In 2004, the Rochester Institute of Technology psychologist Nicholas DiFonzo and another rumour researcher, Prashant Bordia, analyzed more than 280 Internet discussion group postings that contained rumours. They found that a good chunk of the discourse consisted of the participants sharing and evaluating information about the rumours and discussing whether they seemed likely. They realized, in other words, that people on the sites weren't swapping rumours just to gossip; they were using rumours as a vehicle to get to the truth, the same way people read news.

"Lots of times people will share a rumour not for their benefit or for the other person's benefit, but simply because they're trying to figure out the facts," says DiFonzo, one of the leading figures in the resurgence of rumour research. Some types of facts seem to be more urgent triggers than others.

Rumours that involve negative outcomes tend to start and spread more easily than ones that involve positive outcomes. Researchers sort rumours into "dread rumours," driven by fear ("I heard the company is downsizing"), and "wish rumours," driven by hope ("I heard our Christmas bonus will be bigger this year"). Dread rumours, it turns out, are far more contagious. Perhaps even more than negative stories dominate the news, negative rumours dominate the grapevine. In the absence of other sources of information, people turn to rumours to answer their most urgent concerns - suggesting that rumours play a vital role, not a peripheral or idle one, in times of worry, and can have a profound impact on how a town, city, or society reacts to a negative event.

When it comes to rumours about people rather than events, psychologists have found that we pay especially close attention to rumours about powerful people and their moral failings. Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College who studies the evolutionary roots of gossip, has found that we're particularly likely to spread negative rumours about "highstatus" individuals, whether they're our bosses, professors, or celebrities.

Our behaviour, McAndrew suggests, evolved in an environment in which information about others was crucially important. Back when humans lived in small groups, he theorises, information about those higher than us on the totem pole – especially information about their weaknesses - would have been hugely valuable, and the only source we had for such information was other people. (McAndrew's work, much of which focuses on our obsession with celebrity culture, suggests our brains aren't terribly adept at distinguishing people who are "actually" important from people who simply receive a lot of attention.)

If the fundamental dynamics of rumour have roots that run deep into history, the means of transmission have been changing a great deal recently. Unlike previous forms of media, the Internet has created a two-way street - a way to quickly connect with likeminded people - that greatly multiplies the power of rumours. "In the course of a single day, people across the country might hear the same rumour spoken in almost exactly the same words," says Eric Foster, a psychologist at Temple University who studies gossip and social networks.

Given what we know about which rumours thrive and persist, the particular rumours that have dominated this season seem almost custom-crafted to replicate themselves and spread to a wide audience: They're negative rumours about high-status individuals that hint at moral failings.

So are such rumours impossible to stop? Not at all, says DiFonzo, who has counselled businesses, organisations, and academic institutions on how to fight rumours. The first and perhaps most obvious point is that it's futile to attempt to rebut a rumour that's true, says DiFonzo. Even if it works initially, "people who are interested in ferreting out the facts are really very good at it over time if they have the proper motivation and they work together."

Other than denying a rumour that's true, perhaps the biggest mistake one can make, DiFonzo and other researchers say, is to adopt a "no comment" policy: Numerous studies have shown that rumours thrive in environments of uncertainty. Considering that rumours often represent a real attempt to get at the truth, the best way to fight them is to address them in as comprehensive a manner as possible.

Anthony Pratkanis, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies persuasion and propaganda, says that an effective rebuttal will be more than a denial - it will create a new truth, including an explanation of why the rumour exists and who is benefiting from it. "The more vivid that replacement is, the better," says Pratkanis. He and other rumour specialists refer to this tactic as "stealing thunder." When done correctly and early enough in a rumour's lifetime, it can shift the subsequent conversation in beneficial ways.

There are dangers in rebutting rumours by recounting them, of course, the foremost being the inevitability that some people will remember the rumour as true. The University of Michigan psychologist Norbert Schwarz and his colleagues found that listing a rumour first and then rebutting it (the format followed by fightthesmears.com) can backfire, causing some people to remember the rumour but forget the rebuttal.

But in the case of a powerful rumour that looks like it will spread widely, DiFonzo and other experts say it makes sense to assume it will get out, and preemptively target those who are likely to hear it. When thousands of years of human experience are driving something forward, it doesn't make much sense to try to push the other way.

Jesse Singal is the ex-associate editor of CampusProgress.org and pushback.org at the Center for American Progress

Taken from  F.C. Business #50

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