The Mechanism Of Belief In Rumor And Organizational Response Strategy Under Crisis

Recent years, our nation has stepped into a critical period which public crisis take place frequently. The intervention policy that rulers have implemented more and more focus on providing social and psychological support for citizens. In the wake of crisis, how citizens’psychological needs have changed and what kind of behavioral response will occur. As for the discussion of these questions, it will contribute to clearing up and mitigating individuals’negative psychology and has impressive effects on maintaining social stability. Compensatory control theory has once pointed out that when thwarted by control deprivation, people will feel strong need for order and then engage in various compensatory processes including cognitive bias. And in reality, rumors are also distorted explanations of true information. The field of rumor psychology also find that rumors are more likely appear under vague and uncertain situations. Why rumors spread so quickly under crisis, it reflects people’s strong need for order and desire for the truth. Therefore, based on compensatory control theory and rumor psychology’s findings, our study intends to explore that in the wake of crisis, whether people has stronger need for order and are more likely to believe some negative allegations about government. Finally, we are eager to investigate the intervening effect of government crisis response strategies, that is to say, we are longing for making conclusion that if government take rebuild strategies, the above-mentioned effects will disappear.In study 1, by resorting to experiment method, randomly assigning participants into crisis or neutral situation, the results indicate that when controlling the effects of some intervening variables including age, gender and grade, crisis still has strong effect on the need for order. That is to say, compared to individuals under neutral condition, participants in crisis situation have higher needs for order.Based on the results of study 1, the study 2 was designed to explore whether driven by the strong need for order, people will be inclined to accept the negative allegations concerning crisis. We still regard students as subjects of the study, As for rumor texts, we compile false microblog. The results showed that the participants who in crisis situation, the tremendous change of need for order trigger acceptation of negative rumors.The study 3 intended to investigate the intervening role of response strategies, in this study, half of participants read the material which expresses the government’s diminish strategies under crisis. And remaining participants make acquisition of the measurement that government has take is rebuild. The results told us that the latter are less likely to belief in negative rumors concerning about governments. Finally, all of the results are discussed under the frame of compensatory control theory and crisis communication response theory.