Rumor Theory Research Articles

Does Political Information Dissemination Matter on Twitter?

This study examines the spread of politically related information on Twitter, following the immediate wake of the 2014 Thai coup. The role and use of Twitter cannot be underestimated as it plays a significant and growing impact in conflicts and crises. In specific, this study assessed the use of Twitter in a country like Thailand, where political coups often occur. Furthermore, the incorporation of two perspectives—rumor theory and elaboration likelihood model (ELM)—add value in the assessment of political information dissemination during political turmoil. The study applied both content analysis and survey with rigorous analyses that had tremendous contributions in the course of 2014 Thai coup by understanding the way people behave and use Twitter to spread rumors. Overall, this study sheds vital insights into the ways in which political dissemination is crucial and for people to understand and interpret political coup events.

Soviet Secrecy: Toward a Social Map of Knowledge

Abstract This article offers a framework to model the epistemological terrain of the circulation and regulation of knowledge in late-period Soviet society. It proposes that secrecy and openness operated in a mutually constitutive “social map of knowledge” that was constantly shifting due to the inability to maintain secrecy as a stable category. Investigating the domain of Soviet science, this article sheds light on the work of institutions such as Glavlit, the state censorship authority, which supported the state’s goal to maintain the contours of secrecy as a static category by repeatedly issuing edicts and restructuring the apparatus of secrecy in the face of constant and destabilizing social, cultural, and technological pressures. This stable but volatile condition encouraged a common language of “speaking in secret” that cut across the Soviet social order. The “social map of knowledge” was one with high peaks, where valuable knowledge was placed in the hands of those with power, even as these peaks were under intense pressure to collapse from a parallel market of speculation marked by rumor, suspicion, and conspiracy theories. This form of “stable volatility” became impossible to maintain in the 1980s, when a deluge of information flooded Soviet society.

Effects of online rumors on attribution of crisis responsibility and attitude toward organization during crisis uncertainty

ABSTRACTThis study expands the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) with rumor theory to examine the influence of online rumors on attribution of organizational crisis responsibility and attitude toward organization during a period of crisis uncertainty. Controlling for crisis issue involvement, findings from a three-group with control online experiment (N = 366) revealed that people tend to believe fact-based rumors more than rumors with subjective claims, leading to greater organizational blame and, consequently, more negative attitudes toward the organization. Findings extend the theoretical premise of rumor as postulated in SCCT with evidence that online rumors pose different levels of crisis attribution and reputational threat to organizations and suggest that organizational responses to fact-based rumors might need to be viewed beyond a victim-type crisis.

ICT mediated rumor beliefs and resulting user actions during a community crisis

In the context of Internet and Communications Technology (ICT), this research investigates the acceptance of hate rumor and its consequence during a community crisis situation. Extending prior rumor research for this context, we develop and test a refined model using data collected from victims of a large scale (hate) rumor spread incident. Our data analyses present three main findings. First, during the crisis situation, platform characteristics of media synchronicity and richness of expression affected the likelihood of rumor recipients believing the false rumor to be a true message. Second, rumors received from people with closer social ties were more likely to be believed as true. Third, rumor belief during the crisis was associated with greater intensity of informational and behavioral actions. Our findings provide governments with insights to mitigate the spread of hate rumor especially under community disaster situations. Implications for research and policy are discussed. This paper contributes to the IS literature on rumor theory and its implications by explaining how diverse communication technologies are used in a community crisis, thereby opening new avenue for future research to address the negative consequences of using communication media in the complex ICT mediated world. It shows how media characteristics along with social ties affect the “politics of plausibility”.

The Controversies Regarding the Deployment of THAAD and the South Korea-U.S. Alliance: Focused on Autonomy-Security Trade-off and Rumor Theories

The Controversies Regarding the Deployment of THAAD and the South Korea-U.S. Alliance: Focused on Autonomy-Security Trade-off and Rumor Theories

Spatio-temporal filtering techniques for the detection of disaster-related communication

Individuals predominantly exchange information with one another through informal, interpersonal channels. During disasters and other disrupted settings, information spread through informal channels regularly outpaces official information provided by public officials and the press. Social scientists have long examined this kind of informal communication in the rumoring literature, but studying rumoring in disrupted settings has posed numerous methodological challenges. Measuring features of informal communication–timing, content, location–with any degree of precision has historically been extremely challenging in small studies and infeasible at large scales. We address this challenge by using online, informal communication from a popular microblogging website and for which we have precise spatial and temporal metadata. While the online environment provides a new means for observing rumoring, the abundance of data poses challenges for parsing hazard-related rumoring from countless other topics in numerous streams of communication. Rumoring about disaster events is typically temporally and spatially constrained to places where that event is salient. Accordingly, we use spatio and temporal subsampling to increase the resolution of our detection techniques. By filtering out data from known sources of error (per rumor theories), we greatly enhance the signal of disaster-related rumoring activity. We use these spatio-temporal filtering techniques to detect rumoring during a variety of disaster events, from high-casualty events in major population centers to minimally destructive events in remote areas. We consistently find three phases of response: anticipatory excitation where warnings and alerts are issued ahead of an event, primary excitation in and around the impacted area, and secondary excitation which frequently brings a convergence of attention from distant locales onto locations impacted by the event. Our results demonstrate the promise of spatio-temporal filtering techniques for “tuning” measurement of hazard-related rumoring to enable observation of rumoring at scales that have long been infeasible.

Explaining the Transmission of Rumor and Information on Social Media in Disasters

Many individuals now use social media to communicate in disasters. While there is a high demand for verified information during disasters, such events also provide a fertile field for rumor-mongering. To date, researchers have examined rumor transmission in disasters, but not information transmission. While research on rumor transmission can give some insights into how to control rumors, a key way to stop rumors is to facilitate the spread of verified information. Thus, it is necessary to investigate rumor and information transmission in an integrated fashion. As we are not aware of any study that has provided such an account in a disaster context, we draw on rumor theory and information sharing theory to develop an integrative model of message transmission (both rumor and information) on social media during disasters. We empirically test our model using Twitter data in a disaster, and discuss the similarities and differences between rumor and information transmission. We believe that our model can contribute to research on social media use in disasters, as well as the practice of disaster management.

Rumors About Cancer: Content, Sources, Coping, Transmission, and Belief

Using a sense-making and threat management framework in rumor psychology, the authors used an exploratory web survey (n = 169) to query members of online cancer discussion groups about informal cancer statements heard from nonmedical sources (i.e., cancer rumors). Respondents perceived that rumors helped them cope. Dread rumors exceeded wish rumors; secondary control (control through emotional coping) rumors outnumbered primary control (direct action) rumors. Rumor content focused on cancer lethality, causes, and suffering. Rumors came primarily from family or friends in face-to-face conversations. Respondents discussed rumors with medical personnel primarily for fact-finding purposes, but with nonmedical people for altruistic, emotional coping, or relationship enhancement motives. Transmitters (vs. nontransmitters) considered rumors to be more important, were more anxious, and felt rumors helped them cope better, but did not believe them more strongly or feel that they were less knowledgeable about cancer. Most respondents believed the rumors; confidence was based on trust in family or friends (disregarding source nonexpertise) and concordance with beliefs, attitudes, and experience. Results point toward the fruitfulness of using rumor theory to guide research on cancer rumors and suggest that rumors help people achieve a sense of emotional control for dreaded cancer outcomes, inform the social construction of cancer, and highlight the continuing importance of nonelectronic word of mouth.

Corporate rumor activity, belief and accuracy

An integrated model relating workplace rumor activity, belief, and accuracy is proposed and tested. Senior VPs of Communications from a sample of Fortune-500 corporations and CEOs of established public relations firms were surveyed regarding rumor episodes that they had experienced. Results confirmed previous research on the role of uncertainty, anxiety, and belief in rumor activity. In addition, a reduced sense of control mediated the effects of uncertainty on anxiety, and anxiety mediated the effects of importance on rumor activity. Evidence was found for the roles of group bias in how strongly a rumor is believed. Rumor activity was also implicated in the formation of more accurate rumors. The significance of these results for rumor theory and for Public Relations practitioners is presented.

Rumor and Prediction: Making Sense (but Losing Dollars) in the Stock Market

It is proposed that by making sense of unpredictable price movements, rumors spawn anti-regressive predictions and adversely affect trading decisions despite investor denigration of rumors. Two experimental stock market simulations investigated these ideas. Subjects were presented with news (Study 1) and published and unpublished rumors (Study 2) while participating in a computerized investment game. As compared with controls, all manipulations caused departures from a profitable buy-low-sell-high (tracking) trading strategy despite strong differences in rated credibility between types of information source. Subjects claimed that rumor sources were non-credible and that they were not influenced by rumors in trading decisions; nevertheless they traded on rumors as though they were news. Results integrate rumor theory with the psychology of prediction, extend the corpus of rumor literature to behavior, and highlight the sense-making function of rumor in situations filled with uncertainty.

Psychological Correlates of the Transmission and Acceptance of Rumors About AIDS1

The present investigation was intended to identify the emotional and cognitive factors associated with the transmission and acceptance of widely disseminated misconceptions about AIDS. A rumor questionnaire listing 10 prevalent misconceptions about AIDS was completed by 229 college students. Consistent with predictions derived from current rumor theory (Rosnow, 1980, 1988), anxiety elicited by AIDS rumors was found to be the factor most strongly related to rumor transmission. The subjects who reported having changed their behavior as a result of the AIDS crisis also were likely to transmit AIDS rumors. Regression analysis revealed that, together, personal anxiety elicited by specific rumors and behavior change represented the strongest predictors of AIDS rumor transmission (R2= .24, p < .0001). Anxiety‐provoking rumors perceived as important and personally consequential were most likely to be believed (R2= .56, p < .0001). A minority of subjects (12%) reported behavior changes that actually reduce the risk of AIDS. Implications of this research for AIDS public education campaigns are discussed.

Cognitive set and message processing: Implications of prose memory research for rumor theory

Cognitive set and message processing: Implications of prose memory research for rumor theory