BoingBoing posts about an intriguing new academic book on Rumor Psychology, whose authors find (among other things) that “most workplace rumors are 95 percent accurate.” But I wonder whether publicizing that figure might not have the paradoxical effect of reducing that accuracy rate. That is, maybe rumors tend to be so accurate at least in part because people assume that they’re very likely to be wrong, so that at least some folks exercise skeptecism before passing them on, either by independently trying to confirm them, or at the very least thinking about whether it seems plausible in the context of their other knowledge. If people became convinced that the large majority of rumors were true, might they bypass the kind of pre-transmission scrutiny that is the source of this high accuracy?