To Rumor Is Human

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror.

—Paul of Tarsus, First Letter to the Corinthians

I asked my wife the other day if she had a watercooler in her office. “It’s called a coffeepot,” she replied.

She had correctly understood my question. I was wondering about the spot where people happened to gather, where hearsay tends to get passed along. Wherever people live, work, or play in community, the watercooler effect springs up. It transpires around a watercooler, near a coffeepot, at a pub, in a piazza, on the quad, in a chat room, on the street, at a barbershop, in a blog, or over a back-yard fence.The watercooler effect occurs wherever rumors flow.

Herman Melville wrote about the watercooler aboard a Navy frigate he sailed as a common seaman in his 1850 novel, White-Jacket. It was called the scuttle-butt:

Melville described it as a crowded spot where five hundred sailors, servants, and cooks from all parts of the ship gathered throughout the day to get water. The scuttle-butt was the place where informal communication and rumor flourished: “There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt....” Slaking his thirst, a sailor might announce to anyone in earshot: “We’re bound for Boston straightway—I overheard the Captain’s man.” Or whisper: “The Secretary of the Navy is a corrupt old buzzard!”Or complain:“In Norfolk,I hear there are signs saying:‘Dogs and sailors keep off the grass!’” Word would often spread rapidly through the ship’s crew by way of the scuttle-butt. And so over the years, the term has come to mean any sort of rumor, hearsay, word-of-mouth, or gossip.

This book is about the psychology of what happens at the “scuttle-butts” of the world. It concerns basic mental and social processes that occur whenever people interact informally, whether face-to-face around a watercooler, over the telephone, or “virtually” on the Internet. It explores our collective intelligence in the face of uncertainty. It delves into the dynamic sensemaking that is characteristic of our human social experience. It is about the extraordinary power of the ordinary phenomenon we call rumor.

At the time I write this, ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko has died from poisoning by the radioactive reagent polonium-210. Police first thought he was slipped the lethal substance at a sushi bar in London while meeting with an Italian, Mario Scaramella; Scaramella also tested positive for the poison though only mildly. Since then, suspicion has fallen on another ex-KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, who met with Litvinenko for tea the same day. In this cloak-and-dagger saga reminiscent of a good spy novel, Litvinenko issued a public deathbed indictment of Russian president Vladimir Putin as the perpetrator of this crime. Rumors about Litvinenko’s demise proliferate: One portrays the poisoning as suicide; another that Scaramella would also perish; a third that British atomic scientists have ascertained the polonium-210 was man-made and originated in a Russian nuclear reactor. Time may—or may not—ferret out the facts of this real-life political thriller.

Rumors are frequently entwined with the events of the day. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, for example, rumors flowed freely: “Beware of Ryder, U-Haul, and Verizon trucks: in the past twenty-four hours, thirty of them (rented by persons of Arab ancestry) were not returned—doubtless to be employed in deadly terrorist bombings.” “A towboat and a Coast Guard post—both in Mississippi—were showered with anthrax by crop-dusting aircraft.” “Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel were dispatched to New York City the day before the September 11 attacks, proving that the government knew of them in advance.” These stories reflect some of the human qualms, quirks, queries, and fears that filled those days.

On an intuitive level, all of us can relate to rumors; we attend to, discuss, or disseminate them—often daily. They are a fundamental phenomenon of social beings. Every person on the planet in every period of human history has almost certainly been affected by or involved in some aspect of hearsay. It is a universal human enterprise. Rumors proliferate wherever people interact. There are computer rumors, corporate rumors, disaster rumors, medical rumors, military rumors, personnel rumors, political rumors, school rumors, and rumors about religion, race, and relation-ships. Workplace rumors are particularly widespread. In the fall of 1992, workers at the General Motors automotive plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were informed that the facility would be shut down by the end of the following summer. Standing in an employee parking lot in front of a sign proclaiming “Park your Foreign-Made Vehicles Elsewhere—NOT HERE,” union boss Bob Harlow told the press that he hadn’t received much else in the way of information. Rumors circulated wildly among plant workers, who were naturally worried about the future of their jobs: “The plant will be taken over by the Japanese.” “NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) is to blame.” “The plant will stay open to produce the Saturn.” It was a trying time for these employees, and in this era of mounting globalization, an oft-repeated state of affairs in the manufacturing sector.

The study of hearsay has much to say about the psychology of persons and groups. My rumor research has helped me to under-stand how people perceive and think of themselves, others, and the world. Rumor investigations have afforded me insight into people’s anxieties. Understanding rumor has widened my knowledge of how attitudes arise and are altered, how people process data, how we collectively cultivate explanations, how prejudices and stereotypes surface and stay afloat, how conflicts spiral out of control, how person-to-person relationships and rapport are preserved in conversation, the paramount value of interpersonal trust in all human trans-actions, and why public relations schemes may or may not persuade. Rumor has a lot to teach us about the psyche of Homo sapiens.

Rumor is intriguing, ubiquitous, and provides a porthole into human psychology. These are all good reasons for researching rumor—but they were not my reasons at the time I began this line of inquiry. My work on hearsay is like the hobby of long-distance running. Joggers often commence with practical incentives—such as weight loss or social pressure—until more noble impulses begin to dominate: devotion to the sport, the rush of the “runner’s high,” appreciation of the “art” of movement, love of the landscape. For me, rumor was an idea that my illustrious and encouraging advisor, Ralph L. Rosnow, was interested in. Ralph—a prodigious intellect known primarily for his pioneering work on techniques in data analysis, philosophical issues in psychology, and volunteer subject effects—has contributed much to what is known about rumor. Ralph prodded me into the pursuit of hearsay.

Ralph became interested in rumor after reading Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman’s seminal work on the topic, The Psychology of Rumor, published in 1947. Allport and Postman had researched rumor using a system similar to the game of “whisper down the lane.” In their studies, each person passed a verbal description of a picture—from memory—on to the next person down the line. No discussion was permitted. Because people can remember only so much data at any one moment, these serially transmitted “rumors” got smaller—that is, details and fine points of the message were lost with each retelling. As stated by Allport and Postman, rumors “shrunk.” However, Ralph observed just the opposite in a real rumor that commenced in 1969, that Paul McCartney of the Beatles was dead. This rumor seemed to grow over time—that is, the details associated with the story increased in number. For example: McCartney’s death was signified by his bare feet on the cover of the Abbey Road album; the band was covering up his passing; John Lennon sang “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever”; and a Life magazine photo of Paul was fabricated. Additional developments about Paul’s demise seemed to arise each week. This apparent contradiction—rumors grew but they were supposed to shrink—piqued Ralph’s curiosity and he soon discovered a dearth of scientific study in this area. The rumor research terrain was untilled. But by the time I met Ralph in 1990, he had conducted numerous investigations on the topic and had written nearly a score of important scholarly manuscripts on rumor. Ralph’s work greatly widened what we know about the psychology of rumor.

One afternoon, Ralph asked me to stop by the campus library and copy a recent article by John Pound and Richard Zeckhauser, professors at Harvard University. Pound and Zeckhauser were interested in rumors about corporate takeovers and mergers.When corporations merge, their stock values often rise dramatically. Investors pay attention to hearsay about takeovers and mergers. Theoretically, a rumored stock could be purchased and then sold later at a great profit, particularly if the rumor proved true. This leads to an intriguing question: Is trading on rumored stocks indeed profitable? Pound and Zeckhauser stated the problem more precisely: would an investor who bought stock based on rumors do better than if he had simply invested in standard blue-chip stocks? In other words, do people who trade on rumors earn more money than the market as a whole?

To answer this question, they carefully collected published rumors from the Heard on the Street column of The Wall Street Journal and compared the performance of these rumored stocks with the market average. Heard on the Street often prints word of mouth heard in the financial marketplace. Pound and Zeckhauser found that investors who heeded the advice of Heard on the Street hearsay did no better than the average. Contrary to the accepted wisdom of many on Wall Street, stock market rumors—at least those published in Heard on the Street—afforded no great advantage to investors. Pound and Zeckhauser were not bullish on rumors. Ralph and I thought the study was fascinating, and we wondered whether there might be a way to study rumor using the stock market. At the time, this prospect appeared rather daunting; I knew very little about securities and stock trading. But I soon discovered how I could use the “stock market” to study rumor.