Study On How Online Rumors Getting Dispelled

Rumor often goes with human society, and in this era of internet, online rumors are omnipresent. Rumor makes people relieved when they feel stressful and uncertain about the outside world, meanwhile, it causes many damages to the society. The development of communication technology is whether help rumor dispelled or not. To answer this question, the author manages to offer an answer or answer clues via a controlled experiment. This research is an interdisciplinary program, by making four kinds of rumor(about safeguarding rights, science, causing panic, expressing anger), introducing network discuss as the stimuli, through posttest-only control group design and comparative analysis between experimental group and control group to study how network discussion influence these four kinds of rumor getting dispelled.The author has chosen freshmen and sophomores in Chongqing University as participants, and divided the 50 subjects into experimental group and control group through match and random assignment. Only the experimental group have a network discussion about the four types of rumor before they fill out questionnaires. The core issue has been explored after statistical analysis for the two group’s questionnaires.This study attempts to put different weight on seven dimensions of reliability of rumor: source of rumor, communication context of rumor, channel of rumor, importance of rumor, ambiguity of rumor, expectations and the degree of affectionate involvement of audience. Then the experts grade every piece of rumor on its reliability. The measurement of rumor dispelling depends on three dimensions: interests, sharing and trust. Through three comparisons: the experimental group’s credibility of rumors vs. the experts’ credibility of rumors, the control group’s credibility of rumors vs. the experts’ credibility of rumors and the differences of rumor dispelling between the experimental group and the control group, we can conclude that:1. The process of rumor dispelling is complicated. Actually, once rumor starts spreading, there are always some people getting interested, trust and share it with someone else, while others are not. Rumor spreading and dispelling are carried on at the same time. Data from experiments indicate that network discussion would block rumor about safeguarding rights and expressing anger dispelling, contribute to rumor about science dispelling, but not affect rumor about public panic dispelling. What’s more, among the three dimensions of rumor dispelling, network discussion has a remarkable influence on credibility of rumor.2. Comparing with the emphasis on rumor’s importance and ambiguity in traditional survey, we have found that audience’s expectations and the degree of affectionate involvement also play vital roles in rumor dispelling, especially for rumor about safeguarding rights and expressing anger. The reason is that people are not always being rational when they process information, emotion would disrupt them to make decisions.3. Discussing online probably brings polarization, particularly for rumor about safeguarding rights and expressing anger. If people showed partiality for a certain rumor, group discussion would reinforce their original concept and got a more biased view.4. Internet has limited effect in rumor dispelling. For rumor about science, owing to abundant information available on internet and no stereotypes, it will get dispelled much faster. However, lacking of authoritative information source, rumor about public panic is hard to get dispelling, furthermore, the scare will extend, other versions coming up. Rumor about safeguarding rights and expressing feelings both are difficult to dispel.