The Broad Chit Chat: How Do Rumors Spread? Lena Przybłowska
Imagine your coworker just sat down with you for lunch and they are dying to talk about the new employee and how likely they will fail their training. Or maybe the author of the book you have been reading has had their private DMs posted on the internet in which they say their fanbase is annoying. We have all been a part of such situations present in daily life, but have you ever wondered how is it that the rumours actually spread? And is there any way we can benefit from such an exchange of information?
mouths and gossip about anything they hear; and the stiflers - the people who put a stop to the spread of rumors. Scientists have established that the spread of rumors is similar to the contamination process. Different behaviors and environments influence the process of rumor spreading and the forgetting rate - the time it takes us to forget the information we were given. To put it simply, there are three types of people based on how they react to rumors. Some people do not hear rumors in the first place and therefore don’t react to them at all. Others will gladly pass them on, and then there are those who do not care enough to tell others. We’re generally aware that rumors are not exactly the most credible and trustworthy source of information. This fact, combined with the different types of rumor responders, suggests that there might exist personality types of radical believers in rumors, and those who will be more reluctant to do so.
Over the years scientists have proposed multiple models representing the spread of hearsay. Let’s go over a more simplified one and, in my opinion, the most interesting one - the epidemic model - in a less scientific sense. The epidemic model concerns the spread of rumors in the same way as an epidemic may spread. The crowd is divided into the following: the ignorants – those who do not hear the rumors at all; the spreaders - those who like to open their
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