Rumor is a type of story that may be true, false or somewhere in between. It can be a simple tale of an interesting event, or it can be a detailed account of a specific person’s sexcapades. Rumors can also be about important issues like war, school closures or environmental pollution. Whatever the subject, a rumor can spread rapidly because it often touches on some aspect of people’s emotions. This is why some rumors are so difficult to stop.
Social science researchers studying rumors generally agree on some common factors that contribute to their success. These include a sense of urgency (e.g., a rumor about the safety of food products or the effectiveness of vaccines); the presence of plausible but unexplained evidence (such as witness testimony or photographs); and the fact that rumors can be passed from one person to another without being confirmed as true. This last factor reflects an intuitive understanding that if something is a potential concern to many individuals, then the rumor has greater potential to gain legitimacy by repeating itself, as well as a natural human tendency to believe things that are repeated (Allport and Postman 1947).
In some cases, rumors may be able to be traced back to an original source. In other cases, a rumor will reach a point where it becomes a “megalomania” and is passed on by people with a desire to see it spread. This usually happens once a rumor has made it to the megaphones of social media accounts or popular celebrities with large followings.
Rumors may be more successful in gaining credibility if they are accompanied by visuals or a video that support the claim being made. This is a strategy that is used by some news organizations in order to increase viewership and readership.
There is an additional element that may be particularly relevant to digital rumors – a tendency for people to treat literate forms of a rumor as more credible than oral ones, due to the historical association between written words and authority. This tendency can be augmented by the fact that some rumors are shaped through a collaborative process, with participants shaping and sharing content in a way that seeks out truth.
While communication has changed dramatically since party-line phone calls and black-and-white television, the study of rumors is still very relevant today. In fact, the same basic framework used by social scientists to understand how rumors spread can be applied to new concerns, such as the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. The distinction between these and a rumor, however, remains an important one. For example, the term misinformation is probably a better fit for claims that are distributed through low-quality scientific journals or propaganda might be more accurate for concerted efforts to manipulate public opinion. A rumor, on the other hand, can be more easily stopped when the focus shifts from trying to disprove individual claims to considering how a particular rumor might be affecting broader audiences.