Facts get tangled in ‘grapevine’

The dancing raisins commercial – featuring the song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – recently was up for television awards. The standards for judging the nominations would, I suppose, depend on artistic ability, degree of communicability and audience reception. But the theme of the commercial – rumor – is a subject of vast interest.

We all know there is no faster means of communication among executives, supervisors and employees than the grapevine. Whether it is an asset or a liability, no one can deny its existence and everyone from the manager to the office boy plays the game.

Whether the exchange takes place in the coffee bar, at the lunch table or on the parking lot, the complicated grapevine begins with two people and quickly spreads as each of the two make numerous other contacts. A tells the story to B; B tells the story to C; A tells it to D; C tells it to E; and so on and on and on. Or A may tell it to three or more people who then spread the story to three or more, and on and on.

Who do some people thrive on rumors? First of all, most of us share a natural curiosity about other people and events. We listen to become informed, to speculate and to have some means of sociable exchange with our friends.

Rumors are generally prefaced with “It’s only a rumor, but do you know what I just heard,” and the process begins. Rumors thrive in the absence of standards of evidence; distortion of the facts is a real threat.

This can be observed in the game of gossip in which one whispered story repeated throughout a group takes on a whole new context when the last person repeats what he just heard. Distortion is evident in most forms of human communication, legends, myths, unrecorded past events of family tales, witticisms and proverbs. Soon a person hearing an old tale cannot be sure whether it is fantasy or fact.

Two conditions usually exist for a rumor to persist:

 It must be of interest to the teller and the listener.
 The facts must be ambiguous in some way, while the amount of rumor in circulation varies with the importance of the subject and the evidence pertaining to the topic.

Rumor-spreaders may perceive they are building their own ego by “being in the know” and by “having a source of information.” They may project themselves into believing and transmitting the story.

On most matters, we are all inexpert, and to that extent we are rumor-prone. We have neither the time nor the patience to check a statement for accuracy.

If we can accept rumors for what they are, rumors and not facts, then playing the game usually is harmless. But if we fall prey to the deadly game of continuing a rumor that might destroy a person’s reputation or credibility, then we are in a dangerous area.

Organizations or businesses that rely on rumors as a means of communicating run the risk of fostering misunderstanding within the organization. Stopping a “rumor mill” once it is firmly established often is time-consuming and difficult and therefore many communication problems can be avoided if gossip is discouraged.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1987