How should researchers treat questions of veracity when conducting interviews in settings rent by large-scale violence, such as war and genocide? To what extent should researchers trust narratives ...that are generated in politically sensitive contexts? The article argues that the value of narrative data does not lie solely in their truthfulness or accuracy; it also lies in the meta-data that accompany these testimonies. Meta-data are informants' spoken and unspoken thoughts and feelings which they do not always articulate in their stories or interview responses, but which emerge in other ways. This article identifies and analyzes five types of meta-data: rumors, inventions, denials, evasions, and silences. The article argues that meta-data are not extraneous to our datasets, they are data and should be viewed as integral to the processes of data collection and analysis. Meta-data indicate how conditions in the present shape what people are willing to say about violence in the past, what they have reason to embellish or minimize, and what they prefer to keep to themselves. Attending to meta-data is important for responding to informants' fears about talking to a researcher and to ensure informants' safety after the researcher leaves the field. It is also crucial for the robustness of researchers' theories and knowledge about political violence and other political phenomena. The article draws from the author's nine months of fieldwork in Rwanda in 2004, as well as the literature on conflict and violence from political science, anthropology, history, and sociology.
This article discusses the rumour of gold in an indigenous, Andean community. As the rumour circulated, it triggered speculation regarding potential claims to the gold, as well as concerns about how ...extraction should be managed in order to maintain a good relationship with the animate landscape. Specifically, the rumour tested the previous flexibility of community rules concerning land access, as well as assigning more responsibility to the rotated local leadership position. Rumours offer insights into the social and emotional contexts within which resource extraction takes place, while at the same time playing an important part in shaping these very same contexts.
Recent decades have seen growing historical interest in the phenomenon of rumours, how they arise, their impact on events and what they reveal about those who circulate them. This has included a ...number of studies relevant to the outbreak of the First World War, not least, in Great Britain's case, of the so-called 'spy scare', which led to thousands of aliens facing police investigation and heightened fear of Germany. The focus of this article is on exaggerations in Britain of German aggression in early August 1914, including rumours that Germany had attacked France without a formal declaration of war, that Berlin delivered an ultimatum to Italy, demanding it enter the conflict, and that the Germans also had invaded such neutral states as Holland and Switzerland. These rumours, it is argued, served a similar purpose to the 'spy scare', deepening patriotic feeling and consoling Britons that their government's decision to fight was justified. But the article also shows that exaggerations of German aggression may have impacted on the government decision, that some Cabinet ministers may have believed the stories circulating about Germany and that the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made his own contribution to the rumour mill.
Rumours may influence health-related behaviours, including the uptake of and adherence to HIV prevention products. This study assessed the safety and effectiveness of a vaginal ring delivering the ...antiretroviral dapivirine for HIV prevention in Africa. We explored negative rumours about study participation and the vaginal ring amongst study participants and their communities in Malawi, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In total 214 women participated in either single or serial in-depth interviews, or a focus group discussion. Three key findings emerged in the data. Firstly, rumours reflected fears concerning the ring and trial participation. Given the historical-political context of the countries in which the trial was conducted, the ring's investigational nature and its foreign origin, ring use was rumoured to cause negative health outcomes such as cancer and infertility and to be associated with practices such as witchcraft or Satanism. The salience of these rumours varied by country. Secondly, rumours reportedly affected participants' adherence to the ring, and other women's willingness to participate in the study. Finally, participants reported that participant engagement activities helped address rumours, resulting in enhanced trust and rapport between staff and participants.
Despite decades of research from other academic fields arguing that gossip is an important and potentially functional behavior, organizational research has largely assumed that gossip is malicious ...talk. This has resulted in the proliferation of gossip items in deviance scales, effectively subsuming workplace gossip research into deviance research. In this paper, the authors argue that organizational research has traditionally considered only a very narrow subset of workplace gossip, focusing almost exclusively on extreme negative cases which are not reflective of typical workplace gossip behavior. Instead of being primarily malicious, typical workplace gossip can be either positive or negative in nature and may serve important functions. It is therefore recommended that workplace gossip be studied on its own, independent of deviance. To facilitate this, the authors reconceptualize the workplace gossip construct and then develop a series of general-purpose English- and Chinese-language workplace gossip scales. Using 8 samples (including qualitative, multisource, multiwave, and multicultural data), the authors demonstrate the construct validity, reliability, cross-cultural measurement invariance, and acceptable psychometric properties of the workplace gossip scales. Relationships are demonstrated between workplace gossip and a variety of other organizational variables and processes, including uncertainty, emotion validation, self-esteem, norm enforcement, networking, influence, organizational justice, performance, deviance, and turnover. Future directions in workplace gossip research are discussed.
Building on ethnographic research in Uganda, this paper discusses the mundane practice of rumour mongering and gossiping as anticipatory practices. Crude oil discovery in Uganda brought a small oil ...boom to the region endowed with the natural resource including some infrastructure development and the presence of foreign oil exploration and construction companies. With these companies came (young) men working for them or aspiring to get employed. However, as the development of the oil remained in a phase not-yet-ness, a temporal space opened for rumours about the oil and anyone involved with it to flourish in the oil region. Especially, since information on the (national) development of the oil project was scarce. The rumours used familiar tropes such as gender stereotypes or witchcraft to relate to the presence of foreign or at least non-local casual workers. Ugandans living in the oil region wondered what negative repercussions the boom might have for them and viewed the strangers with suspicion. During my fieldwork, I encountered rumours of wife-snatching, sexual harassment and even human sacrifice. This paper argues that these rumours can be understood as risks narratives or the sharing of anticipatory knowledge. The rumours were not only reflections of the past but were told in anticipation of the dark side of the future.
This study, based on data collected from a representative sample of adults in the United States, explores the social cognitive variables that motivated Americans to validate rumours on social media ...about Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, both of which struck in August/September 2017. The results indicate that risk perception and negative emotions are positively related to systematic processing of relevant risk information, and that systematic processing is significantly related to rumour validation through search engines such as Google. In contrast, trust in information about the hurricane is significantly related to validation through official sources, such as FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and major news outlets such as The New York Times. Trust in information is also significantly related to systematic processing of risk information. The findings of this study suggest that ordinary citizens may be motivated to validate rumours on social media, which is an increasingly important issue in contemporary societies.
نبذة مختصرة
استنادًا إلى البيانات التي تم جمعها من عينة تمثيلية من البالغين الأمريكيين ، تستكشف هذه الدراسة المتغيرات المعرفية الاجتماعية التي تحفز الأمريكيين على التحقق من صحة الشائعات حول إعصار هارفي وإعصار أيرما على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي. تشير النتائج إلى أن إدراك المخاطر والعواطف السلبية يرتبطان ارتباطًا إيجابيًا بالمعالجة المنهجية لمعلومات المخاطر ذات الصلة ، وأن المعالجة المنهجية مرتبطة بشكل كبير بالتحقق من صحة الشائعات من خلال محركات البحث. في المقابل ، ترتبط الثقة في المعلومات بشكل كبير بالتحقق من صحتها من خلال المصادر الرسمية ومنافذ الأخبار. تشير هذه النتائج إلى أن المواطنين العاديين قد يكون لديهم الدافع لإثبات صحة الشائعات على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي ، وهي قضية ذات أهمية متزايدة في المجتمعات المعاصرة.
الكلمات الدالة: إدراك المخاطر ، معالجة المعلومات ، الشائعات ، وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي ، الأعاصير
摘要
基于从具有代表性的美国成年人样本中收集的数据，本研究探讨了促使美国人在社交媒体上验证有关飓风哈维和飓风艾尔玛谣言的社会认知变量。结果表明，风险感知和负面情绪与相关风险信息的系统处理中呈现正向相关性，系统处理与通过搜索引擎验证谣言显著相关。相比之下，对信息的信任程度与通过官方来源和新闻媒体进行验证显著相关。这些结果表明，普通公民可能会被激励去验证社交媒体上的谣言，这在当代社会中是一个越来越重要的问题。
关键词：风险感知，信息处理，谣言，社交媒体，飓风
In this article I argue that the telling of family secrets is tied into the workings of family memories and that the stories that people tell cannot be regarded as simple factual accounts. Rather ...they are amongst the kinds of stories that are part of the constitution of 'the family'. Secrets, it might be assumed, are buried and forgotten but it is equally likely in families that secrets can be kept alive by innuendo, palpable silences, and rumour. I argue that it is important to understand the sociological significance of family secrets, not because they reveal a simple 'truth' about family life, but because these secrets are a route into understanding the complex relationship between power, the personal, the cultural and the social. This entanglement of secrets, memories and family practices is explored through written accounts of family secrets found in the Mass Observation Project. The study of family secrets throws additional light on the everyday workings of families and the ways in which family stories are managed.
The widespread existence of cooperation is difficult to explain because individuals face strong incentives to exploit the cooperative tendencies of others. In the research reported here, we examined ...how the spread of reputational information through gossip promotes cooperation in mixed-motive settings. Results showed that individuals readily communicated reputational information about others, and recipients used this information to selectively interact with cooperative individuals and ostracize those who had behaved selfishly, which enabled group members to contribute to the public good with reduced threat of exploitation. Additionally, ostracized individuals responded to exclusion by subsequently cooperating at levels comparable to those who were not ostracized. These results suggest that the spread of reputational information through gossip can mitigate egoistic behavior by facilitating partner selection, thereby helping to solve the problem of cooperation even in noniterated interactions.
Aim. This study aims to examine, in the Bulgarian context, the relationships between vaccination attitudes and acceptance on the one hand, and use of communication channels, trust in medical ...authorities, and belief in misleading information on the other. Materials and methods. A cross-sectional study of Bulgarian respondents was conducted between April and May 2022 using a self-administered online survey with 1,200 participants. Logistic regression models were implemented to examine first, the association between conspiracy beliefs and COVID-19 vaccination uptake and second, between susceptibility to misinformation, sociodemographic variables, trust in medical authorities, and the use of information sources. Results. People who agreed with at least one of the conspiratorial statements were 8.56 times more likely to decline immunization. Belief in rumours and conspiracy theories was associated with a higher perceived risk of adverse events and lower perceived benefits of vaccination. In the logistic regression models, age, residence, and mistrust were associated with believing in rumours and conspiracy theories. Sourcing information from health authorities was negatively associated with belief in rumours while getting information from relatives and friends had the opposite effect. Conclusions. Misinformation had a significant impact on vaccine uptake. More efforts are needed to dispel myths and rumours surrounding vaccination.
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