"Myths which are believed in tend to become true..."1
Hoaxes and myths have existed for eons. Think about the stories of the Greek gods and Lochness Monster. "Urban legend" is the term used to distinguish more modern deceptions from those of the past (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend). A major difference between today’s urban legends and their previous counterparts is the speed by which they can spread. The Internet provides many billions of people any number of easy ways to spread information – real and fabricated alike – more quickly than ever. Take for example the recent incidents with the “balloon boy” story and the news about Michael Jackson’s death. With so many people putting up so much information so quickly, it becomes a challenge to decide what is true and what is not.
If you Google “credibility of websites,” you will be presented with over 2 million results, some explaining how to identify credible web resources and some explaining how to create them.
Here’s a few examples:
- Assessing Web Site Credibility
- Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources
- How to Make and Spread Rumors
This has become such an issue that Stanford University conducted the Stanford Web Credibility Project to investigate what leads people to see a web source as credible.
Here is what they found:
"In order of impact, the five types of elements that increased credibility perceptions were 'real-world feel,' 'ease of use,' 'expertise,' 'trustworthiness,' and 'tailoring.' The two types of elements that hurt credibility were 'commercial implications' and 'amateurism.'" 2
So all in all, what Stanford found was that it was the look of a website that attributed to its credibility, not the content itself. Want to spread a rumor? Get yourself a web designer and you'll be all set!
In my own experience, I have noted that emotion plays a large part in how quickly a rumor will be propagated. If a rumor’s subject is one people are passionate about, they often skip the step of thinking critically about it and simply react. I am not the only one who has noticed this claim:
- What Fuels Urban Legends, from Psychology Today,
- Stories Change the World: Rumors Are Stories That Stick,
- The 8½ Laws of Rumor Spread.
Once rumors spread, it seems to be difficult to counteract them. How can the problem be managed? Well, from a smaller perspective of trying to manage rumors about yourself or your own organization, you need to monitor what is being said and squash it. Managing Online Rumors by Jonathen Bernstein sums up some good advice that I have taken and found to be true.
How to handle this problem when it occurs on a large scale, such as with the health care or global warming debates, is still a question. It would seem that more people need to take personal responsibility for finding the illogical parts of the information they receive. I do not believe that is realistic, however. There is also the added problem of how to deal with individuals who surround themselves with only the information they want to hear, see, read, etc. As I move through my career as a media psychologist student, I will look for studies on Selective Exposure Theory to see if they discover any insight into how to combat this problem.
Here's a question: How do we get Leslie McColgin At Trace Creek Baptist Church Health Care Informational Meeting and folks like her more exposure?
After all, she isn't nearly as entertaining as this:
1. Orwell, G. (1968). In S. Orwell, I. Angus (Eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3 (p. 6). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
2. Fogg, B.J., Marshall, J., Laraki, O., Osipovich, A., Varma, C., Fang, N., Paul, J., Rangnekar, A., Shon, J., Swani, P., Treinen, M. (2001). What Makes Web Sites Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study. Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University, Retrieved from http://captology.stanford.edu/pdf/p61-fogg.pdf March 21, 2010.
