Professor Cass Sunstein provides some helpful suggestions on how to deal with rumours directed against you.
Un-usual Suspects Speaking Up For You
When your cause or interest is under attack, often the easiest thing to do is take to the airways (twitter feed/web) and attack the ill founded rumours against you. Strangely enough, that well may just the wrong thing to do, and will only increase people’s belief in what your opponents are saying.
Sunstein notes: “The broader conclusion is clear. If a false rumour is circulating, efforts at correction may not help; they might be futile and they may even hurt. Once a cascade has spread false information or group polarization has entrenched a false belief, those who tell the truth in order to dispel the rumour may end up defeating their own goal.”
If your interest is under attack, instead you should reach out to some the unexpected. As Sunstein puts it “There is an important general lesson here. If you want people to move away from their prior convictions, it is best to present them not with the opinions of their usual adversaries , who they can dismiss, but instead with the view of people with who they closely identify.” He gives the example of a Democratic politicians being attacked. If Democrats deny the rumour, you may not be much moved, but if Republicans do, you might well reconsider. This worked well for President Obama. He secured the support from well-known Republicans like Colin Powell and Charles Fried, and these unusual suspects worked particularly effectively against smears against the candidate.
A good way to squelch a rumour is to demonstrate that those who are apt to believe it in fact do not.
Don’t Keep Talking About the Rumour
Does denouncing the false story help your cause? It does not seem to.
Sunstein observes that “It is well established that when people are given information suggesting that have no reason to fear what they previously thought to be a small risk, their fear often increases. this mysterious finding is best explained by the fact that when people’s attention is focused on a risk, their fear grow, even if what causes them to focus on that particular risk was information that the risk was in fact small. It is scary to think about a danger, even if it is unlikely to come to fruition; people may not be comforted to hear that they have (say) a one in one hundred chance of dying from a heart attack in the next five years, or that their child has a one in one thousand chance of developing leukemia. So too, perhaps, with corrections of false reports: by focusing people’s attention on these reports, they can increase the perception that what was falsely reported may in fact have occurred.”
Useful lessons to bear in mind when your interests come under attack.