Completeness and Accuracy of Recall in the Diffusion of the News From a Newspaper vs. a Television Source

Abstract

The study of the word-of-mouth flow of news to audiences is an important if somewhat neglected topic. First, this may be the only means by which some citizens receive information about events and issues in their community. Second, in disaster situations many people cannot be reached by conventional means, and critical information comes to them by word-of-mouth. The present experiment makes use of the Allport and Postman design for the study of the changes (leveling and sharpening) that messages undergo as they are passed from one person to another in serial retelling. A news story of just over 300 words was presented to a set of “starter” subjects. Each then passed on the information to another subject, who in turn passed it on to a third, and so on. Seven such chains were developed with six subjects in each of two versions of the experiment. In one the information was presented as a newspaper story. In the other, the (same) story was presented via television. Those in the newspaper chains remembered more details overall than those involved in the television version. However, a clear pattern of “leveling” was characteristic of all the chains. An analysis of the salient details that survived through the six subjects in each of the chains (regardless of medium) showed a coherent and more or less logical organization of the central ideas and not a random jumble of distorted facts. Thus, word-of-mouth transmission of news can convey meaningful, if greatly abbreviated, versions of stories to a secondary audience. However, the data suggest that audiences recall more complete information from a newspaper presentation of a story than from a television exposure.