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A rumor or rumour (see spelling differences), is "an unverified account or explanation of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in public concern" (33)^[1]

Psychology of Rumor (1947)

In the 1947 study, Psychology of Rumor, Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman concluded that, "as rumor travels it [...] grows shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told."^[2] This conclusion was based on a test of message diffusion between persons, which found that about 70% of details in a message were lost in the first 5-6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions^[2].

In the experiment, a test subject was shown an illustration and given time to look it over. They were then asked to describe the scene from memory to a second test subject. This second test subject was then asked to describe the scene to a third, and so forth and so on. Each person?s reproduction was recorded. This process was repeated with different illustrations with very different settings and contents.

Allport and Postman used three terms to describe the movement of rumor. They are: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. Leveling refers to the loss of detail during the transmission process; sharpening to the selection of certain details of which to transmit; and assimilation to a distortion in the transmission of information as a result of subconscious motivations.

Assimilation was observed when test subjects described the illustrations as they ought to be but not as they actually were. For example, in an illustration depicting a battle-scene, test subjects often incorrectly reported an ambulance truck in the background of the illustration as carrying ?medical supplies,? when, in fact, it was clearly carrying boxes marked ?TNT (102).?

Rumor as Social Cognition (2004)

In 2004 Prashant Bordia and Nicholas DiFonzo published their Problem Solving in Social Interactions on the Internet: Rumor As Social Cognition and found that rumor transmission is probably reflective of a "collective explanation process." (35)^[3]. This conclusion was based on an analysis of archived message board discussions in which the statements were coded and analyzed. It was found that 29.4% (the majority) of statements within these discussions could be coded as ?sensemaking? statements, which involved, ?[...]attempts at solving a problem.? (42)^[3] It was noted that the rest of the discussion was constructed around these statements, further reinforcing the idea of collective problem solving. The researchers also found that each rumor went through a four-stage pattern of development in which a rumor was introduced for discussion, information was volunteered and discussed, and finally a resolution was drawn or interest was lost (48)^[3].

For the study, archived discussions concerning rumors on the Internet and other computer networks such as BITnet were retrieved. As a rule, each discussion had a minimum of five statements posted over a period of at least two days. The statements were then coded as being one of the following: prudent, apprehensive, authenticating, interrogatory, providing information, belief, disbelief, sensemaking, digressive, or uncodable. Each rumor discussion was then analyzed based on this coding system. A similar coding system based on statistical analysis was applied to each discussion as a whole, and the aforementioned four-stage pattern of rumor discussion emerged.

Rumor in 2008 American Presidential Election

Democratic Party presumptive nominee Barack Obama was subject to a number of rumors during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Many of those rumors acquired political significance and co-shaped the public discourse despite their demonstrable falseness (e.g. Obama = Muslim) . As part of the Obama campaign's strategy of immediate response, it dedicated an entire website to fight the rumors. Paradoxically, that move may have contributed to spreading those rumors even more persistently since it has been shown that, as time passes, the source of a rumor becomes less and less important, while the faux message remains.

References

1. ↑
2. ↑ ^{a b}
3. ↑ ^{a b c}