A couple of weeks ago, a friend frantically texted to me to have coffee. She heard a story about the Ian’s special ed classroom, and she had to share. Over coffee, she said that she heard from one woman, who may or may not be mentally stable, that kids in the special ed classroom were found having sex in the stairwell last year. I ran this story by school administrators today, and they laughed. Nothing like that ever happened. The administrators sounded truly amused, so I’m sure that it was a false rumor. But it was interesting how quickly it spread through the town. I’m sure that the story spread, because people tend to think that all special ed kids are sexual deviants.
Brendan Nyhan, who is writing for the Times’ Upshot today (yay!), explains that the Internet is fertile ground for false, but juicy stories. Including that story about the woman with the third boob.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve found people believe rumors about students, period. They do seem more likely to believe rumors about people they don’t see regularly. My daughter told me her former classmates spread rumors about her after she changed schools; she apparently had a drug habit and was pregnant. Nothing of the sort happened, of course–but I’m sure they all had a good time gossiping.
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It does explain why other mothers seemed stunned when I was so…calm and happy when they asked how my daughter was doing. In hindsight.
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One of my friends was the victim of false rumors about her sex/dating life (essentially accused of promiscuity). The sad thing was how much the parents believed it, including discouraging their daughters from friendships or socializing with her. She remembers it as a terrible, isolated time.
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Not really all that harmful, but during my sophomore year of high school, as a prank our x-country coach & civics teacher very successfully spread a rumor that I was a foreign exchange student. I had a few funny/awkward conversations with other students when I didn’t realize they thought I was from somewhere else, and the other parents were *really* impressed one time when my mother showed up to a x-country meet. Kids were also confused when I showed up for my junior year (you like America that much!). Funnily, despite telling people I wasn’t actually an exchange student and having siblings at the same school, the rumor never went away and I spent three years of HS with people assuming I was an international student. If a totally benign and easily disprovable rumor sticks around, I imagine a pernicious one would be much harder to get rid of.
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The graph in the upshot article is really stupid. Are we supposed to be looking at the difference in K between the “True” and “False” line? Are they actually mislabeled. Cumulative graphs are often problematic, and cumulative stacked graphs are really problematic, if this is indeed a cumulative stacked graph. They should make that one harder to find in XL.
Also, the articles didn’t tell us “how false rumors spread.” Only that they do.
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Including that story about the woman with the third boob.
That’s the one that’s in the back, for dancing, right? Or maybe that’s another story.
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That was Spy, right?
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Or National Lampoon?
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I think National Lampoon. It stuck with me since highschool, anyway. I guess something had to.
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So, how and why do they spread? Let’s do it here. We all have theories about this, I’m sure.
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I recently learned about something called the Gutenberg Parenthesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_orality
which explains why internet culture is more like preliterate culture in some ways than it is like literate culture.
I learned about it while watching a 20/20 show about something called “the slender man” which quite frankly scared the crap out of me and kept me awake the other night:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/slender-man-stabbing-survivors-parents-describe-horrific-ordeal/story?id=25787516
It’s kind of the opposite of an internet fairytale — horrible horror stories that kids in particular are likely to believe when they find them on the internet. (Watch the part on the 20/20 show where the kids all say “Yeah, we’ve heard of this” and the parents haven’t a clue.)
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I’d think you’d want to separate the Secondary Orality-type of rumoring from the “she’s sleeping with lots people” rumoring that people mention above. The latter doesn’t seem to have much to do with any recent shift in the culture and to have a great deal to do with forms of attempting social dominance and/or deliberate cruelty for it’s own sake.
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Here’s the link to the original slender man site on creepypasta. See how it’s treated as if it’s real?
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Slender_Man
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This is gonna require some extraordinary actual evidence, and not just “creative strategy” plus extrapolation — especially since the range varies by a factor of eight in the first place and an order of magnitude in the second — or it’s going to be a case study in how false stories spread. In this case, the driver is going to be “because it fits a powerful partisan interest.”
http://blogs.reed.edu/earlyvoting/commentary/did-non-citizen-votes-deliver-nc-to-obama-and-assure-democrats-a-filibuster-proof-majority-in-the-senate-in-2008-a-new-study-argues-that-they-did/
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My friend was a young male Dean of Students at a Girls’ School and the only male faculty member under 50. A mom called the head one day and said, “I’m embarrassed to ask this, but does Mr. Z moonlight as a male stripper? My daughter insists it’s true and I cannot dissuade her of this.” We were all amused and still sometimes tease him about it.
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