Rumors are the transmission of information through personal contacts and other social channels. They can be reliable or unreliable, but they can play an important role in the formation of opinions and moods in society.
Instruction manual
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The rumor phenomenon is a process of transmitting information through social channels. Rumors may vary in certain degrees of certainty.
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Contrary to popular belief, rumors do not necessarily have anything to do with reality. Researchers have made many attempts to prove the opposite. So, during one of these experiments, sociologists conducted a survey of people with different levels of education and affluence. They were all asked the same question - "How often do you come across rumors?" It turned out that the higher the intelligence and level of wealth of a person, the more confident he is that he often encounters rumors. But in fact, the results of this experiment do not say anything about the reliability of rumors and only confirm the connection between intellectual development and subjective perception of rumors.
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Rumors are not expressed in value judgments. For example, when one girl secretly tells another about her attitude to a young man, this is not a rumor. Another thing is if she accompanies her story with previously unknown facts from his biography. Rumors are born only when the information transmitted from person to person contains information about the subject, facts.
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Rumors as a phenomenon have been known since time immemorial. They were even used for political and ideological struggle. For example, even during the heyday of the Roman Empire, the Romans spread rumors in the enemy troops about the unprecedented courage of their soldiers. Apparently, the Tatar-Mongols used a similar technique. Russian chroniclers were confident in the large numbers of the Tatar army and estimated it to be no less than 10, 000 people. Although according to historical demographics, the Tatar-Mongols simply physically could not have such a huge army at that time.
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In the modern world, with the onset of the flowering of market relations, rumors began to be actively used for commercial and manipulative purposes. In the United States, there were companies that spread rumors to advertise goods, provoke work strikes, combat these strikes, etc. For example, in order to prevent a strike, often among the wives of workers of a factory they started a rumor that union members received money for workers' protests.
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Rumors play the role of a universal means of transmitting information, especially when other methods of collecting information are difficult. They can serve as a driving force in the formation of opinions and moods in society and are often used as an instrument of additional political influence.