
“Shooting the Messenger” is a Psychological Reality - yarapavan
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/05/08/shooting-the-messenger-is-a-psychological-reality-share-bad-news-and-people-will-like-you-less/
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yarapavan
Abstract:

Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the
messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a
preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad
news from a random drawing as relatively unlikeable (Study 1). A second set of
studies points to the specificity of the effect: Study 2A shows that it is
unique to the (innocent) messenger, and not mere bystanders. Study 2B shows
that it is distinct from merely receiving information with which one
disagrees. We suggest that people’s tendency to deem bearers of bad news as
unlikeable stems in part from their desire to make sense of chance processes.
Consistent with this account, receiving bad news activates the desire to
sense-make (Study 3A), and in turn, activating this desire enhances the
tendency to dislike bearers of bad news (Study 3B). Next, stemming from the
idea that unexpected outcomes heighten the desire to sense-make, Study 4 shows
that when bad news is unexpected, messenger dislike is pronounced. Finally,
consistent with the notion that people fulfill the desire to sense-make by
attributing agency to entities adjacent to chance events, messenger dislike is
correlated with the erroneous belief that the messenger had malevolent motives
(Studies 5A, 5B, and 5C). Studies 6A and 6B go further, manipulating messenger
motives independently from news valence to suggest their causal role in our
process account: the tendency to dislike bearers of bad news is mitigated when
recipients are made aware of the benevolence of the messenger’s motives.
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Link:
[https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-19962-004](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-19962-004)

