Psst! Did You Hear About...?

I am working my way through The Watercooler Effect, Nicholas DiFonzo's study of the nature and management of rumors.  This is a useful essay for every manager of an organization, and especially useful for parish pastors.  We pastors help to lead some of the most anxious organizations on the planet.

DiFonzo notes that "a reliable rule is that rumors nearly always result from change in an organization..."  He suggests that these are major organizational changes.  However, he doesn't spend much time, perhaps, in religious congregations.  I had not, for example, taken the time to get a haircut as soon as some folks would like (not now, of course, but at some time in the past).  Soon there was the suggestion that I had gotten a body piercing that I was now trying to hide from the congregation.

Nothing dispelled the rumor except for an unusually severe hair trimming.

I was a bit absent-minded in trimming my beard and mustache one morning.  I made a grievous error in the trimming.  Suddenly I was faced with the prospect of (1) sporting a mustache that would make Adolph Hitler proud, or (2) shaving off the sad remainder and starting over.  I chose the latter option. Soon I was destined--according to the rumor factory--either (1) to be seeking a new call or (2) in trouble with my wife.  The latter notion was partially true, since she never cared for me without a mustache.  

That wife, by the way, was Anne of blessed memory.  You will have to ask Brenda on your own time about her views on my naked upper lip.

The fact that such rumors arose with so little stimulus probably illustrates what rumor experts call the "law of rumor."  That law states that "Rumors abound in proportion to the ambiguity or uncertainty inherent in a situation, and the importance of the topic."  Congregations, for the most part, are organizations with highly ambiguous daily lives.  So it takes little to generate a new rumor.  And, of course, things that might seem small to the outsider can achieve astonishing significance in the eyes of the insider.

A neighbor of a church I know complained that the electronic carillon was too loud.  As a courtesy, we turned it down.  The neighbor happened to be a single woman who had complained about other things in the past.  The pastor had made a few recent enemies by criticizing how tight the congregation was with money for the larger church and other benevolent causes.  It wasn't long before a minority of the congregation had the pastor and the neighbor consorting during afternoon romantic trysts.

This illustrates a couple of facts.  There is, in most Christian congregations, a small but unhealthy fascination with the sexual behavior of the pastor.  There are those who, for a variety of reasons, want that behavior to be sinister in some way.  

It also illustrates the fact that people will believe less credible rumors when they already disapprove of the subject of the rumor.  "When an individual is hostile toward something, or toward somebody, he is the more ready to believe unfounded statements to the discredit of that object or person," DiFonzo quotes from a study done in 1943.  "He seizes upon something he can use as a 'justifiable reason' for his hostility..."

So public figures have to be aware of whom they have irritated.  Public figures have to know what fascinations the general public have toward them and what preconceptions will fit with the rumors that are inevitably generated.  Most of all, we must remember that the volume of rumor in an organization is both a metric of the anxiety of that organization and a way to increase that anxiety level.

I'm getting to the author's recommendations for rumor management.  More on that soon...