The MUM Effect
The Basic Idea
When you were a kid, you might have experienced a pet passing away. Perhaps your fish had to be flushed down the toilet, but your parents explained he was going to join his friends in the ocean. Or, as you buried your hamster, your parents said she was in a better place now - somewhere she could spin on a wheel forever. The sad truth that your pet had passed was either distorted or softened by your parents. Parents always want to protect their children from sadness and anger, which is why they often minimize unpleasant news. Although their efforts helped in the short-term and stopped you from crying, sugar coating the truth can also have adverse effects. Their consolation did not help you to understand death as a natural part of life.
The Minimizing Unpleasant Message effect, commonly referred to as the MUM effect to reflect parent’s tendency to withhold unpleasant information, describes instances in which people avoid sharing bad news.1 People have a psychological aversion to delivering bad news, not only because they want to protect the person they are telling the news to, but also to protect themselves. You’ve likely heard the expression “shooting the messenger”, which describes our tendency to blame the bearer of bad news. Although the messenger rarely has anything to do with what happened, strong emotions that are brought on by unpleasant news can cause us to irrationally behave and condemn the messenger.
If everyone is averse to communicating bad news, then every time information gets passed on, it will slightly be altered to sound more positive. The MUM effect causes messages to quickly become skewed like in a game of telephone. Since it is such a common phenomenon and can distort people’s perception of reality, knowing more about the MUM effect is important.
Why do people keep mum? We consider two explanations. One explanation maintains that people anticipate discomfort from conveying bad news. They might ruminate over the victim’s plight, empathize with the victim’s distress, or feel guilty for their own good fortune. To avoid these discomforts, would-be communicators keep mum. Their silence services an internal equanimity. [...] Our second explanation for the MUM Effect is a self-presentational account: people experience no discomfort when transmitting bad news; rather, their reluctance is a public display. By affecting the reluctance, people regulate a situated image, avoid an unfavorable impression, and pay homage to a social norm. Lest they seem blithe to others’ misfortune, lest they seem callous and cruel, people keep mum.
– Social psychologists Charles F. Bond and Evan L. Anderson in their 1986 paper “The Reluctance to Transmit Bad News: Private Discomfort or Public Display?”2
