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Dread Internet Rumors

Professor DiFonzo,

I’m a graduate student at [a] Journalism School. I’m currently researching a paper on internet rumor, and read your 2004 article in the Social Psychology Quarterly. I’m interested to hear if you’ve done further research in the area since then along with your views on the rise of sites such as Facebook. In your 2004 piece, you also mentioned that people were, generally speaking, more hesitant (at the outset at least) to spread a ‘dread’ rumor than a ‘wish’ one; I wonder if you think this is still the case, or whether things have changed somewhat.

Many thanks for your time.

Regards,

[Graduate Student in Journalism]

Dear Graduate Student in Journalism:

Facebook and sites like these offer a great way to study the network on which many rumors flow. Bernard Brooks, a math professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, and his student David Longo collected data on Facebook sites at RIT (5222 people) and have mapped the network. We plan to simulate rumor flow over this network. Here is a personal network from within that collection:

Among the interesting findings from this research is that the average number of “steps” from one Facebook page to another in this network was between 3 and 4. This is an example of the well-known small-world effect (a network is more tightly connected than we would ordinarily suppose given the number of people in the network).

One’s hesitation about spreading a dread rumor generally stems from the reluctance to spread bad news–no-one likes to be the bearer of bad tidings. However, when the recipient is a friend and that bad news may bear upon him or her, people tend to be more likely to spread the dread rumor. So friendship may moderate the tendency to spread dread versus wish rumors. If you are interested in dread rumors, be sure to read Walker, C. J., & Blaine, B. (1991). The virulence of dread rumors: A field experiment. Language and Communication, 11, 291-297.

Hope this helps!

–ProfNick

Add comment June 6th, 2008

Rumor vs. Grapevine

Dear Professor Nick.
I am a girl from Denmark who currently writes an exam paper on rumors. I am facing a big obstacle in my assignment that I cannot seem to find the answer to – therefore, I was really hoping that you might be willing to help me.

The thing is, that I need to state the distinction/ differences between rumors and grapevine (just in brief). I seriously thought that this would be an easy task, but I was certainly proved wrong. The different authors are either:

referring to the concepts as being the same thing
or that rumors are a part of the grapevine
or that rumors are created from the grapevine (when the grapevine gets sour) – meaning that they are two different things (here grapevine is seen as the positive thing and rumors as the negative).

If you would be so kind, I desperately hope that you would tell me which of these 3 possibilities stated above that carries the correct answer of the concepts.
Thank you very much

Kind regards,

[Girl from Denmark]

Dear [Girl from Denmark],
You have discovered that sometimes terminology is not universally agreed upon. I can give you my best assessment of what these terms mean; I hope it will be helpful.

Grapevine refers to informal channels of communication. When you say “I heard it through the grapevine”, you mean that you heard it informally from a friend or coworker, for example, rather than from a memo, the newspaper, or an official announcement at a meeting (these last examples would be called formal channels of communication).

Rumor is one type of statement that is communicated through the grapevine, and it is also one type of discussion that occurs on the grapevine. Hearing from a friend: “I heard that Mrs. Beamster the librarian drives an expensive sports car” would be an example of a rumor on the grapevine. These rumor statements can circulate and recirculates as the group discusses Mrs. Beamster’s automobile—this is an example of a rumor discussion on the grapevine.

What are rumors? They are unverified statements in circulation. To make this a little clearer, news (“The prime minister won the election yesterday”) is information that has been verified.

Now, both types of information (rumors and non-rumors, such as news) can circulate on the grapevine. You see that, yes? I can hear both an unverified rumor (Beamster drives a sports car I think) and verified news (I read today in The Times that Clinton won the election). However, in my opinion, most of the statements on a grapevine are unverified information statements. I base this on the grapevine studies. When I read the studies by grapevine researchers, the statements they discuss are undoubtedly rumors. Despite this, some grapevine researchers (Keith Davis, for e.g.) say that rumors are negative and false information statements on the grapevine, and only a small subset of grapevine information. I disagree with him on this point; it is clear from his writings that most of what he studied with regard to the grapevine is actually rumor.

I hope this was helpful. Please let me know how it goes.

Best regards,
Nicholas DiFonzo, Ph.D.

Add comment June 4th, 2008