In an era before the internet, social media, artificial intelligence and ultra-partisan TV hosts, rumors could only spread the old-fashioned way, from neighbor to neighbor. Many were planted by Axis propagandists, but others appear to have originated with everyday citizens, frequently arising out of their anxieties, suspicions, prejudices or simple misunderstandings. Whatever was behind them, rumors were often detrimental to the Allies’ cause and, in the worst cases, actually deadly.
While the government’s Office of War Information waged its own fight against rumors, a grassroots movement took hold across the country to stop gossip at its source. Over the course of World War II, more than 40 newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Canada started “rumor clinics” to debunk the lies and fight back with facts.
…
[N]ot everyone was a fan of rumor clinics. Some critics faulted them for helping hearsay reach an even larger audience. In fact, the U.S. government’s anti-propaganda efforts took a different approach, releasing floods of facts while rarely mentioning the rumors they were meant to extinguish.
…
With newspapers across the U.S. urging civilians to send in any rumors they heard, the clinics soon collected thousands of examples. That influx allowed social scientists to make a serious study of the phenomenon. The scholars, in turn, began to see patterns in the data, showing that rumors fell into distinct categories.
In the 1947 book Psychology of Rumor, Allport and co-author Leo Postman divided gossip into three major types: fear rumors; wish (or wishful-thinking) rumors; and wedge rumors intended to drive a wedge between the lie’s recipients and another group, such as Black Americans, Jews, the British, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and labor unions. Analyzing 1,000 rumors collected during the summer of 1942, the researchers reported that 65.9 percent fell into the wedge category, 25.4 percent into the fear category and just 2 percent into the wish category. They classified the remaining 6.7 percent as “miscellaneous.”
For a rumor to gain traction, Allport and Postman believed, it needed two things: The subject of the rumor “must have some importance to [the] speaker and listener,” and “the true facts must be shrouded in some kind of ambiguity.” Ambiguity arose, they wrote, in the absence of news, a distrust of the news or an unwillingness “to accept the facts set forth in the news.” The pair even proposed a formula, arguing that the intensity of a rumor could be determined by multiplying its importance to those involved by its ambiguity in their minds.
As to whether the clinics were effective, the researchers wrote that it was difficult to measure whether they had cut down on the spread of rumors, but they seemed to have at least made people more “rumor conscious,” conferring a certain amount of “rumor immunity” on the American public. Many citizens would now think twice before buying into a rumor or passing it on to others.
From the article:
…
…