Rumor Acceptance during Public Health Crises: Testing the Emotional Congruence Hypothesis

Abstract

Rumors pose a significant challenge to officials combatting a public health crisis. The flow of unsubstantiated and often inaccurate information can dilute the effects of more accurate messaging. Understanding why rumors thrive in this context is a crucial first step to constraining them. We propose a novel mechanism for explaining rumor acceptance during a health crisis, arguing that the congruence between one’s emotional state and the emotion induced by a rumor leads people to believe the rumor. Data collected using a novel experimental design provide preliminary evidence for our emotional congruence hypothesis. Participants who felt angry were more likely to accept anger-inducing rumors than those who were not angry. We discuss the implications of this insight for public health officials combatting rumors during a health crisis.

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Notes

1. Repeatedly assessing anger would draw attention to these emotions, which has been shown to undermine their influence on judgment (Schwarz, 2012).

2. Although we did not expect belief in rumor to change over time, we did test a model including time and found that this factor did not affect belief in rumor (= – 0.01, t(302) = –0.24, p = .81).

3. HLM software provides no test of indirect effects in multi-level models.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1149599. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation