On Reluctance to Communicate Undesirable Information

Rosen, S., & Tesser, A. (1970). On Reluctance to Communicate Undesirable Information: The MUM Effect. Sociometry, 33(3), 253-263.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1970

Volume

33

Issue

3

Pages

253-263

DOI

10.2307/2786156

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/2786156

Cited from

physics

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Selective Propagation
  • Three remedies are available: shorten the chain through skip-level review and site visits, add a parallel route whose survival rule differs through anonymous reporting or an audit function that reports elsewhere, or precondition the content through structured forms that strip the penalised features before any layer can penalise them.

Domain-specific

• False Consensus Effect
  • Management — leaders assume their values are widely internalized in the organization while subordinate dissent goes underdetected.

    This sourceEstablishes the MUM effect — communicators suppress and delay bad news up a hierarchy — the mechanism by which subordinate dissent goes underdetected while leaders overestimate buy-in.

Mechanisms

• Field Report Review
  • The MUM effect — people's reluctance to transmit unpleasant news up a hierarchy — means intermediate authors soften or omit exactly the constraints the review needs, so the corpus systematically understates trouble.

    This sourceIntroduces the MUM effect as reluctance to communicate undesirable information.

Verification

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