Rumor is a form of information that has not been verified. It is often used to describe gossip, falsehoods, or untrue stories. It can also refer to a person who spreads such rumors.
In the digital age, rumor has become easier to spread than ever before. People can share information quickly on social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. Some rumors even cause great panic in society.
Researchers have studied rumors from a variety of perspectives, including psychological studies and computational analyses. However, it has been difficult to study rumor-related behavior in real life because observing how individuals react to a rumor would require real-time collection of reactions. Nevertheless, early research on rumors revealed that they can be controlled by a variety of factors.
One factor that influences the spread of a rumor is its credibility. The higher the credibility of a rumor, the more it will influence people’s decisions and the faster it will spread. The correlation between a rumor and people’s lives is another factor that influences the spread of a rumors. The stronger the connection between a rumor and a crowd, the more it will be supported.
Although the credibility of a rumor is important, most previous studies did not include it in their models. Consequently, these models could not explain why some rumors are more convincing than others. In this article, we propose a new model of rumor spreading that considers rumors’ credibility, the correlation between a rumor and people’s life, and crowd classification based on personality. We call this model the SEIsIrR model.
In our model, individuals are divided into five classes according to their behavior in the process of a rumor spreading: Steady ignorant, Radical ignorant, Hesitating, Spreader, and Stifler. Individuals in class E are hesitating, meaning that they believe the rumor but do not spread it or stop spreading it. Individuals in class S spread the rumor to other individuals. Individuals in class R stop spreading the rumor and sometimes even forget it.
A hesitating group is crucial to a rumor’s spread because it slows down the rate at which the rumor becomes widespread. This is why hesitating groups are more likely to support a rumor than non-hesitating ones. In addition, hesitating groups tend to believe more positive rumors than negative ones. Negative rumors, such as bogie or wedge-driving rumors, reflect a feared outcome (e.g., an enemy surprise attack) or undermine interpersonal relations. These rumors have greater impact on people’s decision-making than positive rumors do. Moreover, they can be disseminated quickly on the Internet because people have little control over these rumors’ credibility. Therefore, it is critical to take measures to prevent rumors from spreading on the Internet. A good way to do this is to verify the accuracy of a rumor before spreading it. For example, a rumor that nuclear leakage caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster would pollute salt was widely spread on the Internet and led to panic buying of salt.