Barack Obama Is John McCain's Black Baby

Jesse Singal has an interesting article in the Boston Globe applying recent social science to the rumors circulating on the campaign trail. An excerpt:

Experts began to look at rumors more analytically in the 1940s and 1950s, in a wave of research fueled by concern about how rumors could be managed during wartime. Though interest waned during the following decades, rumor studies have seen a resurgence in the last decade or so—partly because researchers are now more able to tackle complex, dynamic phenomena, and partly because they're newly armed with the biggest ongoing social psychology experiment in human history, the Internet, which provides them with terabytes of recorded rumors and a way to track them.

In 2004, the Rochester Institute of Technology psychologist Nicholas DiFonzo and another rumor researcher, Prashant Bordia, analyzed more than 280 Internet discussion group postings that contained rumors. They found that a good chunk of the discourse consisted of the participants sharing and evaluating information about the rumors and discussing whether they seemed likely. They realized, in other words, that people on the sites weren't swapping rumors just to gossip; they were using rumors as a vehicle to get to the truth, the same way people read news….

Other than denying a rumor that's true, perhaps the biggest mistake one can make, DiFonzo and other researchers say, is to adopt a "no comment" policy: Numerous studies have shown that rumors thrive in environments of uncertainty. Considering that rumors often represent a real attempt to get at the truth, the best way to fight them is to address them in as comprehensive a manner as possible.

Anthony Pratkanis, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies persuasion and propaganda, says that an effective rebuttal will be more than a denial—it will create a new truth, including an explanation of why the rumor exists and who is benefiting from it.

I don't agree with all of the article. Specifically, I don't think it's always true that "To the extent people do have an agenda in spreading rumors, it's directed more at the people they're spreading them to, rather than at the subject of the rumor." But there's a lot of good sense here as well, all of it rooted in the recognition that rumors are "inherent to human nature—naturally occurring, inevitable human social phenomena, rather than pesky distractions from more civilized discourse." Even false tales can reflect real fears. In many ways, the stories people are telling about Palin and Obama are more interesting than Palin and Obama themselves.