In week 3, Prof. Rosanna posted the picture and raised a question: which of the lines (A, B, or C) is as long as the blue line?
If your answer is B, but most of your classmates claim that it should be C, are you still stick with your original answer?
This case reminds me of rumors. I'm interested in this topic as I often receive rumors on SNS. I'm always wondering why my friends always forward untrue statements, which could be easily seen through.
A rumor is a story or statement in general circulation without confirmation or certainty as to facts.【1】Here the statement "line C is as long as the blue line" could be regarded as a rumor before we do measurement. Of course, in this case, it is simple to verify it by measuring the four lines. After executing the measurement, we could know that the correct answer is B. However, during the lecture, we could not verify it and some classmates were influenced by the rumor and feeling uncertainty about the correct answer. Ambiguous is a fundamental factor of a rumor.
Rumors are a ubiquitous feature of our social and informational landscapes. The study of rumors has a long history as well. Nevertheless, people haven't achieved agreement from psychology perspective view. Rosnow (1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous or uncertain events, and because talking about them helped "catharsis" and reduced associated anxiety[2]. However, Bernard Guerin and Yoshihiko Miyazaki (2006) thought otherwise, they suggested that rumor tellers just utilized these very properties of anxiety and uncertainty to make a good story and improved their social relationships.[3]
Obviously, the cost of believing and forwarding a rumor is much less than that of verifying it. Laziness is human nature, that's an important reason why rumors spread quickly and hardly be stopped.
I believe most people have received the following claim:
The average person needs to drink eight glasses of water per day to avoid being "chronically dehydrated."The statement has been broadcast many years, and many people believe it. In fact, there is no scientific proof for it. The best general advice is to rely upon your normal senses. If you feel thirsty, drink; if you don't feel thirsty, don't drink unless you want to. [4]
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| Drinking 8 glasses of water per day |
Just like the "8 glasses water per day", some statements are difficult to tell if they are true. But if we really want to be wise and not be fooled by the rumors, it is not that difficult in this information age.
How to tell if rumors are true? The key is keeping critical thinking. Do not believe it so easily when you read a statement that is against your common sense. When you begin to doubt, you are not far from the truth. Snopes.com is an ideal website to verify the "urban legends". Another tool is the search engine. When we read breaking news from some unofficial channel, we could Google it to check (More professional way is to search it on major media by news engines, such as http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/).
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| Do you believe that π is not equal to 3.14, but is 4? |
Keep in mind: the rumor stops by the wise. Let's be the wise and stop the rumors!
Comments are welcome!
Reference:
1. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rumor?s=t
2. ROSNOW, R. L. (1991). Inside rumor: A personal journal. American Psychologist, 46, 484-496.
3. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Analyzing+rumors,+gossip,+and+urban+legends+through+their...-a0142338936
4. http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp
