It is a challenging task to find the logic of rumour, however, one thing is certain, it spreads faster than official communication. I last wrote about the subject nine years ago, and rumours seem to be growing worse and more damaging.
Within the literature, it could be argued that rumour is a happy, common social activity that helps people feel less anxious. However, when one observes that educated people, presidents, and owners of social platforms spread mis(disinformation), it is no longer a mechanism to relax anxiety. One can give it any other definition. Even worse is when platform content farms infiltrate a country’s legal and electoral processes.
The term ‘rumour’ does not require that the information be untrue. Many times, it fills an information vacuum. In his work ‘A Sociological Study of RumoUr’, sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani observed that when formal information is absent, people compensate by interpreting the situation and making sense of omitted data.
In ancient China, the rumour was used as a monitoring tool, and in our contemporary age, perhaps, it is still used in parts of the world.
According to researcher Adam Berinsky, rumour has been studied in social science for more than a century and it became insidious with the Internet when it became easier to spread false or misleading information. In the early 1900s information credibility depended on the author’s moral integrity. His assertion was considered accurate if his character was known to be good.
That was also the period of the Coffee-House Culture, which had a great influence on circulating scandals and rumours. It was in coffee shops that all topics were up for debate, and political figures, people with influence, and journalists frequented to discuss the economy, society, and culture at the time.
Scholars suggest that rumour as a social phenomenon, needs to take into account principles relating to the behaviour of the community. Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia noted in their book Rumour Psychology that some attitudes have deep roots and can be traced to the group's cultural traditions. The source of a rumour can come from someone who is the eye and the ear in a neighbourhood, or from someone who has a relative or a friend in an influential position.
While some rumours are intentionally created to see what will happen, others are the result of somebody who genuinely believes what they are saying. Rumours attract attention, evoke emotion, and invite involvement. They can also be cruel, or ruin one’s life for ever.
People tend to share rumours that they perceive as credible when anxieties are intense, and so they are less likely to check the logic of what they pass on, writes Ralph Rosnow in Rumor and Gossip Research. The rumour mill can emerge from veiled power conflicts, or it can be seen as a causal explanation for distressful events caused by a natural disaster or a human-caused event, such as a terror attack.
Cathy Faye notes in her book Governing the Grapevine that social scientists conducted research in the 1940s in an effort to dispel rumours that they thought would jeopardize national security and undermine public morale. Nevertheless, Ron Robin's book The Making of the Cold War Enemy shows that rumour was a suitable tactic to raise morale among soldiers during World War II, as well as to secure support for the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rumours and gossip had entered the celebrity and entertainment journalism scene by the end of 1950.
The multiplicity and many forms in which rumour impacts us remain difficult to grasp. It is a topic that is not just complex; it is constantly changing. Anti-rumour campaigns, workshops, studies, or prisons can have limited effectiveness. The best I can see is to avoid rumours piggybacking on the vacuum of information.
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