Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Rumor
Summary
[[File:WPA-Rumor-Poster.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The 1930s Works Progress Administration poster depicts a man with WPA shovel attacking a wolf labeled 'rumor.]]
A rumor (American English), or rumour (British English; see spelling differences; derived from Latin rumorem 'noise'), is "a tall tale of explanations of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in public concern."
In the social sciences, a rumor involves a form of a statement whose veracity is not quickly or ever confirmed. In addition, some scholars have identified rumor as a subset of propaganda. Sociology, psychology, and communication studies have widely varying definitions of rumor.
Rumors are also often discussed with regard to misinformation and disinformation (the former often seen as simply false and the latter seen as deliberately false, though usually from a government source given to the media or a foreign government).
French and German social science research on rumor locates the modern scholarly definition of it to the pioneering work of the German William Stern in 1902. Stern experimented on rumor involving a "chain of subjects" who passed a story from "mouth to ear" without the right to repeat or explain it. He found that the story was shortened and changed by the time it reached the end of the chain. His student was another pioneer in the field, Gordon Allport.
The experiment is similar to the children's game Chinese whispers.
"A Psychology of Rumor" was published by Robert H. Knapp in 1944, in which he reports on his analysis of over one thousand rumors during World War II that were printed in the Boston Herald'''s "Rumor Clinic" Column. He defines rumor as
a proposition for belief of topical reference disseminated without official verification. So formidably defined, rumor is but a special case of informal social communications, including myth, legend, and current humor. From myth and legend it is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical. Where humor is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for belief.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related concepts (5)
Misinformation
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It differs from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive and propagated information. Rumors are information not attributed to any particular source, and so are unreliable and often unverified, but can turn out to be either true or false. However, definitions of the terms might vary between cultural contexts. Even if later retracted, misinformation can continue to influence actions and memory.
Fake news
Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term "fake news" was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information.
Hoax
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax. Whereas the promoters of frauds, fakes, and scams devise them so that they will withstand the highest degree of scrutiny customary in the affair, hoaxers are confident, justifiably or not, that their representations will receive no scrutiny at all.