6 RUMOR HAS IT
Rumors are the worst, especially when your reputation—your brand—is at the center of one. What happens when a rumor begins to surface? It can result from a terrible game of telephone, a misunderstanding, a person’s mood, or an intentional lie started by one person about another. Can rumors ever be helpful?
I figured that any behavior as commonplace as rumormongering must have an explanation in behavioral science. I was half right. In early 1942, the US government under President Franklin Roosevelt began to worry about the spread of rumors about the war and how they would affect public opinion concerning the United States and its soldiers. By this time in the war, Germany and the other countries that made up the Axis powers were using rumors (mostly being spread by common, well-intentioned people) as psychological warfare with the intent to cause panic and chaos.
Examples of rumors being spread according to the New England Historical Society:8
Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were raping women.
No US Navy vessels survived Pearl Harbor.
A woman’s head exploded after she permed her hair and went to work in a shell factory.
Unmarried pregnant women in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps were sent home from North Africa.
With so much at stake, it made sense that the United States would have tried to find a way to combat these rumors. On June 13, 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the Office of Wartime Information (OWI). The goal of the OWI was to slow the spread of false information and promote “positive” information. Part of the OWI’s strategy included the creation of a radio broadcast called Voice of America (which is operating today) and to introduce something called “Rumor Project.”
The Rumor Project plan included “rumor clinics.” The rumor clinics were to be set up across the United States at universities and colleges and run by a selected group of students and professors. These volunteers would study media and news, and report the information back to the OWI. The OWI identified eight potential locations for their rumor clinics, including one in Boston to be run by psychologist Robert Knapp.
The OWI and social scientists were unable to successfully work together. The OWI wanted to control the clinics and the social scientists wanted to perform research based on their own guidelines. Robert Knapp, who was acting as a consultant to the OWI along with his former teacher, psychologist Gordon Allport, had already launched their own rumor clinic in partnership with the Boston Herald, despite the OWI’s effort to end the psychologists’ program. The OWI plan to launch their rumor clinics never got off the ground.
Knapp and Allport continued their research at the jointly named Boston Herald Rumor Clinic. The clinic surfaced the most notorious rumors of the week and the newspaper printed them on the front page, where journalists discussed and disapproved of them.
After the war, in 1947, Gordon Allport and Leo Postman published their research from the rumor clinics in a book entitled The Psychology of Rumor.9 They defined rumors as “propositions of faith on specific (or current) topics that pass from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without any evidence of their truth.”
Here are the findings about rumors from the published research by Allport and Postman.
Rumors are spread by mouth.
Rumors provide information about people, events, and conditions (circumstances surrounding something or someone).
Rumors meet the emotional needs of a person or community.
Rumors rely on the emphasis given to their characteristics; that is, “How well does the rumor fit in with what I need or want to hear today?” Examples of these characteristics include:
≫ Is the word of mouth backed by the media? (Does TMZ also believe that Elvis is alive? Do they talk about the possibility?)
≫ Is the rumor full of content found publicly versus privately? (Is the rumor about your mother or Donald Trump? I’m not saying that your mother isn’t newsworthy, but the Donald Trump rumor has more legs.)
≫ Are people listening and responding emotionally? (Did Elvis fake his own death? Or is the rumor in response to the emotional need of his fans to understand his death? I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say it was a rumor.)
So we know that rumors require word of mouth, that they need extra media attention to spread, and that when you add emotional needs to the mix, these fabrications spread like wildfire.
Robert Knapp took the liberty of collecting various rumors and dividing them into categories based on their content.
Impossible Dream Rumors
These are pipe dreams—rumors that we wish were true but are simply not possible. Consider these, for example, “There won’t be a test on Friday because the teacher will be sick,” or, “No one will fire me because I am related to the boss.”
Ghost Rumors
These are fear-based rumors concerning ghosts, monsters, and the like. Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, or any alien entity that has ever been discussed on The X-Files is sure to fall into this category.
Rumors That Lead to Disagreements
These rumors are used to ruin relationships and undermine alliances. Some examples are the tactics used on the reality show Survivor and lies spread to break up a friendship or marriage.
Knapp found that negative rumors spread faster than positive ones. One example of a positive rumor resulted from me telling my mother that my internship was with a social media company. “Social media, you know?” I said. “Like Facebook.” She then proceeded to tell the rest of the family that I worked for Facebook. Considering that it was 2010, this made me very popular with my extended family, which I was unaware of until years later, when my cousin asked me about my position at Facebook. (If you ever need a positive rumor to be spread about yourself, tell your mom.)
RUMOR MILLS
There is much more to discuss about rumors and their effects on our lives, both past and present, and how we can combat the negative effects with our personal brands. It turns out that Allport and Postman (authors of The Psychology of Rumor) created a mathematical formula for the basic law of rumors. The formula states that the strength of the rumor is linked to its importance and degree of ambiguity:
R = i × a
Great. These gentlemen told us everything we need to know about how a rumor works and how to categorize it, but the formula for grading it is a bit difficult to understand. What I want to know is, How do rumors get started?
NPR Science ran a podcast episode titled “How Do Rumors Get Started?”10 The episode included expert guests Nicholas DiFonzo, coauthor of Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches, and Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.
Who Starts Rumors?
The short answer is anyone and everyone. In fact, according to Watts, “There needn’t be anything particularly special about the person who starts the rumor, and so this is sort of a bit counterintuitive, because when something special happens—when some, you know, amazing rumor starts sort of sweeping across a city or a country or even throughout an organization, you might think that the person who began it had to be special as well. But that actually turns out not to be the case necessarily.”
What does have an impact on starting rumors, according to Watts, is social networking. Social networks connect many groups of people, irrespective of geographical location, and these groups, not the individuals, magnify the spread of rumors.
Why Do Rumors Start?
This is the biggest question of all. Many times the start of a rumor is due to misinformation; however, it spreads because there is no formal information to counter it. DiFonzo told NPR listeners that “the best way to get rumors going in an organization is to not say anything or to not say very much or to say contradictory things.”
WHAT DO RUMORS HAVE TO DO WITH PERSONAL BRANDING?
What you don’t put online and what you don’t say are just as important, if not more important, than what you put online and comment on. We live in a world where most of us search for people online before meeting them, before hiring them, or when we are just plain bored. We also live in a world where our friends and family tag us online, our companies put our faces on their websites, everyone has a camera, social media and search engines use face recognition, and our phones track us everywhere we go. All of these things make anonymity extremely difficult—and in some instances nearly impossible—for many people.
For those of us who wish to lead private lives and be anonymous in today’s world, personal branding is about being strategic in what you say about yourself, not saying nothing at all. The more information you put out there about yourself, the less room there is for misinterpretation. Formal information has now become extremely important.
For instance, my strategy was to post only the exciting things that happened to me at work. I would post news about my job, articles about my job, and pictures of myself at work events. The results were shocking. Everyone in my life (including my grandmother) constantly talked to me about work. The people geographically closest to me, whom I spent most of my time with, were the only people who knew anything about me outside of work. People I would see on random occasions or play catch-up with at weddings started telling me how proud they were of my success and asking me how I achieved it. The truth is that when I started this experiment, I was no more successful than the average twenty-six-year-old. I may even have been less successful financially and professionally than most of the people I knew, but that was not what people thought about me.
When I got engaged, I posted it on social media. Many people whom I knew and saw regularly, from work or at random local events, didn’t even know that I was in a relationship because I kept my Facebook content focused on work—so much so that Facebook is convinced that I am either a single straight man or a single lesbian woman.
This level of commitment to share only one type of content was incredibly valuable for my career. When all anyone knew about me was that I had a job I cared about and that I spoke about my craft, and when the only images they saw of me showed me speaking at a conference or with another speaker at a conference, they assumed I was an expert in my field. My personal life remained completely private, leaving no room for interpretation about my professional abilities.
WILL THE REAL EXPERTS PLEASE SPEAK UP?
Rumors will spread when there isn’t enough formal information to dispel them. Fake news is not new, and neither are fake experts. What is new is the increasing number of people who have the ability to create and share news. Have you ever watched or listened to someone on television or radio being interviewed on a topic about which you consider yourself an expert, only to realize halfway into the interview that this person knows less than you do? If so, or if you can imagine this situation, how would you respond? Would you call the television or radio host (given that we all have instant access and the ability to find anyone’s contact information) and tell them that their guest should be more expert? Would you ignore it? If you hear someone sharing fake expertise, and you are an expert on the topic, you have missed your opportunity if you do nothing.
Whenever you see or hear a story with incorrect or misleading information from a less-than-credible expert, or a story that could benefit from your expert opinion, reach out to the editor, the media company, the host, or the writer. Inform these people of the misprint or mistake, give them the correction, and let them know why you are a credible source. If you do have expertise in that area, they are indeed incorrect, and they are also receptive, they should gladly make the edit. Most journalists do not intentionally misrepresent the truth; however, many talking heads are misrepresented as journalists. Offer your edit and let the media company or journalist know that they can contact you for advice and commentary on future content in your area of expertise. After working with certain news organizations awhile, you may even get paid to be on call for comments on future stories.
In short, if you truly are an expert, then exert your expertise—don’t let others command the attention when you could do better.
HOW CAN YOU COMPETE WITH SELF-PROCLAIMED EXPERTS?
If you want to build a credible personal brand that allows you to be in a position of authority to dispel bias or false information, you have to understand how and why people find other people credible. Many people who are recognized experts on a topic have been doing it for so long that they’ve forgotten how valuable their knowledge is. They find it difficult and even disrespectful to their colleagues to speak about themselves as experts. Don’t let yourself fall for that thinking.
To be taken seriously and to work toward building an effective, authoritative personal brand, you need to take yourself seriously, evoke authority, and provide more detail, not less.
In “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model,” research scientists Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews at the RAND Corporation discuss the peripheral cues that make people appear credible to others.11 According to them, the field of psychology shows that cues such as the apparent expertise of the source and the format of information can lead people to automatically accept that it is coming from a credible source. The peripheral route also operates when a message contains many arguments (information overload), and listeners are persuaded because they lack the ability or motivation to process all of it. These peripheral cues are shortcuts to increased credibility.
On the internet, peripheral cues are considered a form of Poe’s Law, an internet law that holds that unless you add some form of smiley face at the end of any statement, the reader can perceive it as true (credible) no matter how outlandish it may be. So if you’re going to tell a joke, make it clear that you are joking. For example, if you say something in a sarcastic tone, when you are quoted later, it will be read by people who can’t hear your tone. For more examples of Poe’s Law, read this subreddit: reddit.com/r/poeslawinaction/.
People who claim to be experts will have an easier time being believed than experts who don’t claim the title. According to Paul and Matthews, “Expertise and trustworthiness are the two primary dimensions of credibility, and these qualities may be evaluated based on visual cues, such as format, appearance, or simple claims of expertise.”
The RAND research scientists also found that “online news sites are perceived as more credible than other online formats, regardless of the veracity of the content.” This is why bylines in third-party publications will always be greater indicators of authority, and why personal blogs should be used more for communicating with an audience or for building an authoritative website. In personal branding, a third-party byline or endorsement will always lend more credibility, so it should be even more of a priority than your own website.
When individuals have experience and expertise, they tend to overestimate their audiences’ knowledge on the subject and, in an effort not to overwhelm them with information, they avoid providing many details. This is the exact opposite of what they need to do. According to Paul and Matthews, “In courtroom simulations, witnesses who provide more details—even trivial details—are judged to be more credible.”
A CASE STUDY: GOSSIP CHANGES THE WAY OUR BRAINS PERCEIVE PEOPLE
In an NPR report entitled “Psst! The Human Brain Is Wired for Gossip,” Jon Hamilton discusses a study conducted by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.12 Her research examined how gossip affects what we know and how we feel about an unfamiliar person. The question Barrett’s team set out to answer was, “Once gossip has predisposed us to see someone in a certain light, is it possible for us to see them in a different light?”
The researchers gathered a group of volunteers and asked them to look at the faces of random people. The faces were paired with random bits of gossip, some positive and some negative.
Participants in the study were shown a neutral face paired with (A) negative gossip, (B) positive gossip, (C) neutral gossip, (D) negative nonsocial information, (E) positive nonsocial information, and (F) neutral nonsocial information. When the study participants viewed the faces again, their brains were more likely to fix on the faces associated with negative gossip.
The research team showed each volunteer two sets of pictures at the same time. The left eye would see one image while the right eye would see a different one. For instance, the left eye might be looking at a picture of a face while the right eye was looking at a picture of a car. They did this to test how the volunteers’ brains reacted to the different kinds of information. This scientific method—the process of showing two extreme opposite images—causes something called binocular rivalry, since the human brain is capable of processing only one image at a time. So we will unconsciously lean toward one image and focus on it for longer.
The researchers discovered that when they did this, the volunteers would spend more time on the pictures where a face was paired with a negative piece of gossip than on pictures where a face was paired with a positive piece of gossip. This suggests that our brains are wired to focus our attention on someone more if we are told a pejorative detail about them. Barrett’s team was able to demonstrate how secondhand information about a person can have an enormous effect. In essence, gossip helps us to predict friends and foes.
Another professor of psychology, Frank McAndrew, from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and other researchers have posited that human interest in gossip results from evolutionary development, not poor character. Professor McAndrew attributes this to primitive times when humans lived together in small groups. Prehistoric humans needed to be able to identify threats within the community, where waiting to decide for themselves would have taken too much time and exposed them to more danger. The fastest way to determine whether someone was a threat to the group was through word-of-mouth communication, or gossip.
We now know that gossip has an actual effect on our brains. It is not just an individual experience of how we think about and digest gossip. Our brains are hardwired to be extra cautious around people we have heard negative stereotypes about. Without a counter-effect for these negative and potentially harmful rumors, we become powerless against a problem we may not even know we have.
CASE STUDY: DOCTORS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
We have explored why we should create and populate our social media profiles with positive information. For example, we know that we want to combat negative rumors, online content that we did not post or authorize, and the occasional legal document from a few years back. In this case study, we are going to explore how the content that we post on social media and blog websites can impact our careers.
In an article on United Press International (UPI), Amy Horton discusses a study that looked at the social media presence of newly graduated urologists. The study was conducted by Dr. Kevin Koo, a urology resident at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.13 Koo and his team searched Facebook for the names of 281 doctors who had graduated from urology residency programs in the United States in 2015. The researchers found that three-quarters (72 percent) of the doctors had publicly identifiable Facebook pages, and 40 percent of those pages included “unprofessional or potentially objectionable” content. The content that was deemed unprofessional or potentially objectionable in the study ranged from profanity and images of drunkenness to clear violations of medical ethics, such as the discussion of patient health information.
The study found several cases where patient information was being posted. In one instance, a doctor posted X-rays that clearly displayed the patient’s name. Other doctors disclosed enough information about a case for the patient to be identified, including describing specific complications during a surgery.
The researchers concluded that some doctors use social media in ways that could compromise their patients’ trust in them.
Still other doctors, while they didn’t disclose information, posted images of themselves at parties surrounded by alcohol, stating overly expressive political and religious opinions, and posting on other controversial lifestyle and social issues. This raises two questions: Should doctors accept friend requests from patients? Considering their trusted position, should doctors post public opinions that are unrelated to medicine?
We cannot expect doctors to post only content that is perfectly legal. However, we can take note of how we might feel if we see these behaviors from our doctors and apply that to how we manage our own online presences. The truth is that as long as you are not doing something illegal, if you have enough clout and your message is clear enough, you don’t have to play by all the rules.
POTENTIALLY HARMFUL POSTS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
Aside from patient information and the obvious drunken pictures of yourself on social media, what other types of posts are harmful? Accidentally posting or sharing fake news or misinformation is a big mistake. These are the types of posts that can make you lose credibility with your audience. Before you post, double-check the facts of the content. This can be done quite easily. If you are thinking, “I never share fake news,” trust me, it can happen to anyone, and it happens more often than you know.
In 2016, the Washington Post published an article describing a study conducted by a group of computer scientists from Columbia University and the French National Institute to measure the percentage of shares on social media that people had not read before posting.14 The study found that 59 percent of the links shared on social media had never actually been read before sharing. The study went a bit further, in that the scientists collected two other sets of data to be sure they were correct. They collected all of the Bit.ly (link shorteners) to five major news sources during a one-month period. Then they collected the number of clicks that were logged into Bit.ly’s analytics to create a map of how news goes viral. The researchers concluded that news does go viral but that it is not actually read. However, they also found that most of the clicks on viral news stories were links shared by Twitter users and not by the news outlets themselves. In other words, people are more likely to click a link and read an article if someone they follow has shared it. Since your followers will read what you publish more often than if it were published by an online news site, sharing fake news has a greater negative impact when shared by you—the person with a personal brand.
What does this mean? It means that nearly 60 percent of all links shared on Facebook and Twitter have never been viewed. Think of all of the wasted hours spent by people everywhere just trying to get posts out. When critics say that no one cares what you post online, what they mean is that if you don’t care, why would anyone else?
The lesson is that there is no need to share a bunch of links you don’t even read yourself. For those of you who do share links that you have not clicked on, beware: the link shorteners used on social media to track the reach of links have also been used to spread fake news by pretending the content has come from a news organization. A prime example of this is what happened during the 2016 presidential campaign, when a parody website called ABCNews.com.co pretended to be ABCNews.com. The site spread a lot of false information about the election, and no one realized that it was not coming from ABC News.
FOR HELP WITH FACT CHECKING
Here are a few websites that can help you check your facts and get more tips on how to avoid sharing nonsense:
This website allows you to check who owns a website and can prevent you from sharing fake ABC News information (or from paying for fake Airbnb rentals).
google.com Image Search
If you want to check where an image has originated from or where it has traveled, you can right-click the image and then click “Search Google for Image.” If it is a new image, only a few links will appear; if it is old, several links will appear, and it is most likely spam.
This nonpartisan, nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by US political players, including politicians, TV ads, debates, interviews, and news releases. They also have a political literacy website (flackcheck.org) and other useful tools.
This site will help debunk the vast majority of urban legends, trending topics and images, and rumors spanning a huge number of topics.
This website debunks all of the rumors that end up as memes or in chain emails. The site has mainstream information, but you can make requests as well.
projects.propublica.org/politwoops
This website lists all deleted tweets from sitting political officials and candidates. If you have a question about a tweet and you can’t find it on this site, it probably never happened.
ANYONE AND EVERYONE CAN BE SCAMMED
I once threw my fiancé a birthday party and rented a house through a fake Airbnb site that was a copy of the real one. (When Airbnb tells you not to leave their website, they mean it.) I had booked a house for twenty-six people to stay overnight. My fiancé’s birthday coincides with Halloween, and most of the people attending were coming in from out of town, so I made sure to book in advance. I was traveling for work and very busy, when I received an alert one day that said my Airbnb rental had been canceled by the host. When I messaged the host, he said that his phone application was giving him trouble and gave me his email. When I emailed him, he said that his wife was unfamiliar with the application and had accidentally cancelled my reservation. He apologized and sent me a link to get a discount for my troubles—a link to his fake Airbnb website. I paid the fee and went on my way. The day before the party, my bank called to say that they were unable to process the transaction. I emailed the host and asked him what was going on, and he told me that he wasn’t sure but he would call Airbnb to find out. I didn’t worry about it; I was just relieved that he was handling it. A few minutes later, I got another email from the host: “Airbnb says that the fastest way to get the money to me is for you to Western Union it.” It was a hoax! I had less than twenty-four hours to find a new place in Los Angeles on Halloween weekend for twenty-six people. After hours of additional research and spending more money than I wanted to, I was able to secure a bona fide rental house to celebrate the occasion. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for you, your brand, and your audience to double-check every source.