101 Business Ideas That Will Change the Way You Work

IDEA #96

Need to manage a negative rumour? Challenge its credibility

How rumours turn fiction into fact.

What you need to know

Academic research on how rumours originate generally agrees on the theory that they arise in order to fill a void created by the absence of information in uncertain situations. Three researchers from the Kellogg School of Management and Stanford University have gone a step further and investigated the root causes that make rumours turn from mere fiction into perceived fact. Through four separate experiments, Derek Rucker and David Dubois concluded that although individuals ‘transmit their core beliefs when they ...