Rumor

History of the concept

The concept originates in the searchs for legal Psychologie undertaken starting from 1902 by the German Louis William Stern, who, the first, exposed the “experimental protocol” of the rumor. This one became one since then of the most traditional examples of the social Psychologie (and of the summer camps, thanks to its ludic side): it is a question of creating a “chain of subjects”, which do without a history word of mount, without right to the repetition or the explanation; with the end, one compares the history told by the first subject and that told by the last; naturally, the history as well as possible is truncated, in the worst case deformed.

Stern will not continue its front research, but he will see becoming in his laboratory a young American student, Gordon Allport, which will take again research starting from 1945 and will make an immense best-seller of them. The concept will arrive finally to France at the end of the years 1950, by the means of a course in Sorbonne given by Guy Durandin.

Mechanisms of the rumor

The rumors obey a Logique and rules of which it is possible to analyze the mechanisms. Most of the rumors are produced spontaneously, they are not the fruit of a Complot but of a Mensonge, of " words in the air" whose group or company is seized, for various reasons, and amplify it thus. It seems that the need for " to leave in Crusade " conduit certain people to be seized rumors and to propagate them in order to give an importance, a Social role of which they would be usually deprived. The rumor offers sometimes a simplified explanation and reassuring certain societies' problems, thus explaining its success. A certain number of rumors, as with the approach of elections for example, are produced intentionally with an aim of discrediting an opponent.

Examples of rumors or urban legends

The rumor known as of Orleans

This rumor is thus qualified because of the work published in 1969 by five sociologists directed by Edgar Morin. It implied that the fitting rooms several clothes shops female of this city were in fact of the traps for the customers, who would have been removed there to be delivered to a network of Prostitution - cf the White article Traite.

This rumor is an academic case, by its duration, its extension, its damage, and by its end: if no denial, even official - announcing, for example, that no suspect disappearance was indexed in the surroundings by the police services -, forever successful to put an end to it, it ceased interesting the media when which it took the form of a hoax - the missing customers were dealt with by submarine going up the Loire… Since then, it continues nevertheless to be told in various forms.

The spider in a yucca

The presence of Araignée S in Yucca S is evoked for the first time in Scandinavia and Great Britain with the beginning of the year 1970. In France, the history makes surface in a Lyons newspaper in 1986. Each time, the account is almost identical: the watering of the yucca causes a rustle of the sheets unceasingly more extremely, until the moment when spiders emergent of the plant, the firemen are then called to destroy these animals.

This rumor is of course unfounded: the spiders do not lay in the trees or the vegetation; in any event, the spiders which leave these eggs are so small that they would not attract of anything the attention of whoever. With most extremely by the rumor, in 1986, the importation of the yuccas dropped of almost two thirds (Reumaux, 1996).

The national press had ended up being interested in this rumor and to be made the echo of it, not to hawk it, but, on the contrary, to demystify it and analyze it. A sociologist had very precisely noted the recurring character of certain stereotyped rumors, reappearing all the three or four decades, in a new form: thus the rumor of the “mygale in the yucca” was only one new misadventure of an old rumor according to which one had found a snake dissimulated in a banana mode. The similarity will be noted: old irrational fear of the imported exotic plants.

The hospital of Villejuif

In the middle of the Années 1970 circulated in the form of photocopies a list supposedly published by the hospital of Villejuif and announcing like carcinogens a certain food additive number of , of which inoffensive E330 (acid citric) and even E300 (the vitamin C, which on the contrary is regarded as having carcinogenic effects anti because of its antioxydant capacity). Although the hospital of Villejuif (the Institute Gustave-Roussy, of its true name) contradicted on several occasions to be at the origin of this document, sometimes this urban Légende recovers to circulate episodically, including nowadays by electronic propagation.

An American rumor

With the the United States, with the beginning of the year 1980, Procter and Gamble and Mac Donald, inter alia companies, are confronted with a rumor affirming that part of their Capital would be in the hands of the Secte Moon. The origin of these rumors however could be found: it came from the Homélie S of the fundamentalist pastors of religious communities. These rumors seemed supported by “evidence” when some believed to see the number of the devil (666) in the Emblème of these companies, which ended besides up being modified.

Attached French expressions

the man who saw the man who saw the bear : says itself of a history whose source is not first hand, and who generally is not verifiable.
the Bush telegraph : pejorative expression, born in the meanders of the conflict free-Algerian (first occurrences located with the beginning of the year 1960), indicating conveyed information of word of mount being likely all to be deformed in the course of road, without possibility of checking its integrity at the end of the chain.
Radio-fitted carpet, radio-corridor (in the medium of the companies); radio-coconut, radio-pavement (in the medium of the journalists) are also pejorative expressions to indicate the diffusion of a news connected with the rumor

Bibliography (partial)

French :

Guy Durandin, rumors. Camps of deportees. The problem of handicapped the , Paris, university Information center, coll “courses of Sorbonne”, 1957, pages 1-46.
Pascal Froissart, the rumor. History and phantasms , Paris, Belin, 2002, 198 p.
Jean-Christmas Kapferer, Rumors. Oldest media of the world , Paris, Threshold, 1987, 317 p.
François Ploux, Of word of mount: birth and propagation of the rumors in France of the XIXe century , Sapwood, 2003.
Francoise Reumaux, the black Widow , Paris, Meridian Klincksieck, 1996, 188 p.

Other languages:

Gordon W. Allport & Leo J. Postman, The BASIC psychology off rumor. " Transactions off the New York Academy off Sciences" , Series II, vol. 8, 1945, pages 61 to 81.
L. William Stern, Zur Psychology der Aussage. Experimentelle Untersuchungen über Erinnerungstreue. " Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft" . Vol. XXII, book 2/3, 1902.

Related bonds

External bonds

Site listing the rumors circulating by email
HoaxKiller.fr is an search engine of hoaxes and other urban legends
Site listing the rumors circulating on Internet
RumeursDuNet.com Site which takes again rumors conveyed on university Internet
Site proposing a directory of relevant sites and many texts in line
the White Lady of Palavas (Herault)

References

Random links: