Gossip Gone Wrong

Although most of us like to believe our thoughts and attitudes are impervious to the unforeseen or unwanted influences of others, our thoughts are being bombarded by messages from others every day. How many of us didn’t realize that we “liked” something until it popped up on one of the (hyper-individualized) page suggestions on our Facebooks? An embarrassing number of us, most likely. Social media is not our only source of information, however. Much of the information we use to form our attitudes derives from our interpersonal communications.

Once upon a time, in a far away land called high school, there lived a bunch of teenagers who liked to gossip. One day, I overheard a bunch of girls talking about a specific boy from our school who they kept calling “Ben Baker the Baby-Maker*.” I finally couldn’t stand the curiosity anymore and had to ask them why they kept calling him that. One of the girls jumped at the chance to spread the tale. According to her, everyone knew that Ben had had sex with a girl in one of the school stairwells during class and got her pregnant. The girls couldn’t agree about whether the couple had been caught in the act by the principal, a cop, or not at all, however. My immediate reaction was that these were just silly girls and that the story was far too ridiculous to be true. I quickly put the story out of my mind.

About a year later, I met the “Baby-Maker” through a mutual friend of ours. He was by far one of the sweetest, most good-natured guys I had met at that (awful) school. My immediate thought was that such a nice guy didn’t deserve all the hardships associated with being a teenage parent. I had completely forgotten where I had originally heard the story and only remembered poor Ben as the “Baby-Maker.” It wasn’t until months later that I learned from Ben himself that the entire rumor had just been a prank one of his basketball buddies had played on him.

When I forgot about the gossip girls I originally learned the rumor from and instead focused on the story itself, I exhibited what is known in social psychology as the sleeper effect. According to the sleeper effect, a non-credible source becomes more persuasive over time (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). Despite being unconvinced when I first heard the “Baby-Maker” rumor, after enough time elapsed, my little group of gossip girls seemed much more believable. What is most interesting about the sleeper effect is that when it was first discovered the effect seemed entirely counterintuitive. Credible sources tend to become less persuasive over time therefore common sense would dictate that non-credible sources would become less persuasive as well. To explain this phenomenon, the Hovland research group developed the discounting cue hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, when people first learn information from a non-credible source they tend to discount it, but over time the information becomes separated from who said it in our minds (Kelman & Hovland, 1953). Similarly, as time passed I forgot where I learned the rumor originally and could only remember the information I learned from the rumor itself.

*name altered to protect individual’s identity

(n = 524)

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References

Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on

communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15, 635–650.

Kelman, H. C., & Hovland, C. I. (1953). “Reinstatement” of the communicator in

delayed measurement of opinion change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48, 327–335.