Rumor is a claim or a piece of information about something that has not been officially verified and is commonly spread by word of mouth. It can be true, false, or ambiguous. For example, someone might say “John is rumoured to be getting married” or “I heard John used to be a thief”.
Research on rumor dates back to the pioneering work of Louis William Stern in 1902. His experiment involved a chain of subjects who passed a story from mouth to ear without the right to repeat it or explain it, and found that the story was shortened and changed each time it was told. More recently, a variety of social scientists have studied how and why rumors are created, circulated, and believed.
One theory is that rumor is a response to uncertainty and anxiety. It relieves some of the fear by providing a sense of control over an insecure situation. People are also more likely to spread a rumor if they have an anxious personality or are in a situation that makes them feel insecure. In addition, they are more likely to believe a rumor if it is related to them personally or if they have trust in the source of the rumor (e.g., “That TV news channel is always biased!”).
It has been found that a rumor bomb can be effective in managing an emerging situation because it is both rapidly diffused and has a high level of perceived accuracy. However, rumor can be harmful if it is unfounded or inaccurate and leads to unnecessary alarm.
The authors of the current study investigated a particular workplace setting to understand how rumours are created, circulated, and resolved. The context was a forensic psychiatric unit in a regional hospital, and the work there was both complex and stressful. This created a fertile ground for rumours.
To gather data, the researchers archived online discussions about a series of rumours that occurred in the context under investigation. The discussions were analyzed using a coding system that categorised each statement as being prudent, apprehensive, authenticating, interrogatory, providing information, belief, disbelief, sensemaking, digressive, or divisive. The results from this analysis showed that each rumour discussion followed a four-stage pattern: the rumour was introduced for discussion, information was volunteered and discussed, then a resolution was drawn or interest was lost.
The graph below shows the timeline of each rumour for the nine events investigated. The rumours are coloured according to their veracity status, which is defined by whether they were deemed to be true (green), false (red), or unverified (orange). The journalists also annotated the resolving tweet that was chosen for each rumour, and this has been displayed as a black line in each rumour timeline. This graph reveals that the vast majority of rumours started off as unverified and remained so throughout the entire timeline. However, there were some rumours that were later verified as true and others that were eventually found to be false.