On Sunday, August 19, thousands of people in Ghazni province left their houses in the middle of the night in panic after the rumor of earthquake. The rumor had that a major earthquake would hit the area until 5 am, so it would be better for the residents to leave their houses and find refuge under the open sky. Believing in it, many people from the Ghazni city and some other districts of the province wasted no time in leaving their houses and spending the whole night outside.
The reports even suggest that the announcement regarding the quake were made from the loudspeakers in the mosques by unknown people. Mirwais, a resident of Ghazni city, talking to a news agency, quoted the announcements as saying, “Oh faithful! A severe earthquake is about to hit the area. Leave your houses and move to open places.”
The panic spread by the rumor was so intense that the people, who were in thousands, did not dare to return to their houses till morning. Even the imams of the mosques had started believing in it and according to the statement made by Mirwais, “Later, imams of mosques also started announcing about the earthquake. They asked people to leave their houses as quickly as possible because the earthquake is certain.”
It is unfortunate to note that nobody even tried to ask a simple question, “Is it possible to predict an earthquake hours before it hits an area?” Even the modern science in this regard has failed. It has not been able to predict the date, time, location and magnitude of the earthquakes precisely. Moreover, there has not been any major fortune-teller in Afghanistan who might have predicted historical earthquakes and might have been famous in that regard.
Nevertheless, the people – thousands of them – believed in the rumor that was just few minutes old and that was not connected to reality even to a small extent. But this is how rumor works especially in a society that is backward, illiterate and lacks the capacity to investigate and search and follows or rejects everything blindly.
A rumor is mostly believed to be "an unverified account or explanation of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in public concern." However, this is not a definition that may be agreed upon by all the sociologists and psychologists. But it would not be incorrect to say that rumor is a piece of information whose veracity is not quickly or ever confirmed.
Robert Knapp, who provided a famous work, “The Psychology of Rumor” in 1944, defined rumor as “Rumor is but a special case of informal social communications, including myth, legend, and current humor. From myth and legend it is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical. Where humor is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for belief”.
Rumor is a socio-psychological phenomenon and it has the capacity to influence the social behavior and may even harm it. There are many possibilities that a rumor may be a misinformation and even a disinformation; therefore, they are likely to have their negative influences in the society and social behavior and interaction.
One of the most dangerous aspects of rumor is that it tends to spread quickly and by passing through different people it even keeps on getting far away from reality.
In the 1947 study, Psychology of Rumor, Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman concluded that, "as rumor travels it grows shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told." This conclusion was based on a test of message diffusion between persons, which found that about 70% of details in a message were lost in the first 5-6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions.
In the experiment, a test subject was shown an illustration and given time to look it over. They were then asked to describe the scene from memory to a second test subject. This second test subject was then asked to describe the scene to a third, and so forth and so on. Each person’s reproduction was recorded. This process was repeated with different illustrations with very different settings and contents.
Allport and Postman used three terms to describe the movement of rumor. They are: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. Leveling refers to the loss of detail during the transmission process; sharpening to the selection of certain details of which to transmit; and assimilation to a distortion in the transmission of information as a result of subconscious motivations.
So it means that rumor through the process of spreading keeps on getting more and more distant from the truth. Therefore, what basically the message is to what a person hears as the final information may be quite different. It is important to note that in our world the rumors are used for different purposes by different religious, social and political groups.
They may use the tendency of the people to believe in the rumors for propagation of their version of truth and may get their objectives achieved. And the poor people may be utilized by the self-centered ideas of some of the politicians and religious and social leaders.
In the societies like that of ours where a rumor like that of a earthquake can make thousands of people leave their houses, one can imagine how different types of rumors dodge the innocent people each day and make them believe in so many things that are nothing more than a misinformation or disinformation.
Islam has a very sacred teaching to avoid rumors and make our beliefs stand on strong footings. There are three stages of forming a belief in Islam, namely; Ilm-ul-yaqin: believing in any information after just hearing it; Ain-ul-yaqin: believing in any information after seeing it; Haq-ul-yaqin: believing in any information after sensing it through the senses. And the belief formed on the basis of Haq-ul-yaqin has the highest degree.
Therefore, it is necessary that the people must at least try to have as much investigation as possible whenever they listen to some pieces of information that are new. Blindly following every piece of information can give rise to rumors and nothing else and can disturb and harm the society to a large extent.