On Rumors
How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Many of us are being misled. Claiming to know dark secrets about public officials, hidden causes of the current economic situation, and nefarious plans and plots, those who spread rumors know precisely what they are doing. And in the era of social media and the Internet, they know a lot about how to manipulate the mechanics of false rumors—social cascades, group polarization, and biased assimilation. They also know that the presumed correctives—publishing balanced information, issuing corrections, and trusting the marketplace of ideas—do not always work. All of us are vulnerable.
In On Rumors, Cass Sunstein uses examples from the real world and from behavioral studies to explain why certain rumors spread like wildfire, what their consequences are, and what we can do to avoid being misled. In a new afterword, he revisits his arguments in light of his time working in the Obama administration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The coauthor of the bestselling Nudge continues his quest to gently reclaim human nature from its dysfunctional proclivities in this slender treatise on a slight problem. Sunstein, a legal scholar and Office of Management and Budget adviser, insists that false rumors are a real scourge, now made exponentially direr by the Internet's facility in disseminating them. Rumors, Sunstein says, can cause financial panics and undermine democracy itself by fueling unfounded suspicions of leaders and institutions. He buttresses this thesis with a laborious exposition of the psychology of rumormongering, delving into experiments that prove, among other truisms, that people tend to believe rumors that gibe with their preconceptions. Sunstein's alarmism seems unfounded are rumors really more threatening today than in the pre-Internet dark ages when they sparked pogroms? and the book feels like a padded-out magazine article, climaxing in a few unobjectionable but underwhelming proposals to modestly tighten up libel law. The intellectual turf he has staked out, bounded by law, social regulation and pop psychology, seems played out so perhaps he should let it lie fallow awhile.
