The problem with gossip is we are likely wrong when we think we are so right. A while back we experimented with this. We told teenagers the lyrics of the popular TV theme song to the Brady Bunch. They had never heard the “story of the lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls…”
The song contained 110 words. We laid it out one verse at a time and then asked them to repeat it. Each telling was highly coached and only one generation away from the original. Then we asked them to pass the song along.
In the end, everyone got the lyrics wrong. They were vaguely clear that it was a about a family, and remembered that it was about the Brady Bunch, but beyond that it was a wash of nonsense. If a bunch of sharp teenagers can’t get 110 words right, how much less accurate are you and I when we use 1,000 or 10,000 words to tell a story that we heard from a friend of a friend of a friend?
Don’t believe most of what you hear passed on to you and be careful about what you share. Odds are overwhelming that they got the story completely wrong, and so did you.
No comments:
Post a Comment