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A Theory of How Rumours Arise

University of Paris-Sorbonne

Why does a rumour arise, what is its emerging process like, how does it gain a certain stability? In order to achieve greater understanding of how the selection process might occur in the cognitive market, this paper describes one experiment which attempts to describe the kind of cognitive groping that precedes the emergence of certain rumours. A total of 144 interviews were carried out one-to-one with 72 men and 72 women. Half the interviewees were given a statement briefly describing events from the first puzzle, and the other half another statement from which all contextual details (time, place, nature of the people involved) had been eliminated. The starting-point was that normally about 100 deaths a year are recorded for a population of 10,000. But in the 1980s it was noticed that in the Chinese quarter in the 13th district of Paris, which has around 10,000 inhabitants, there were only two or three deaths a year. How could this discrepancy be explained? The results of this experiment are discussed in detail.

Diogenes, Vol. 54, No. 1, 83-105 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0392192107075292


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