Impact of Topic Attributes and Method of Delivery on Talk Transformation
Kentaro Habata (AY 2015)
When information is passed from one person to another, the content may be unintentionally changed, and this may cause harm to society in the form of hoaxes and rumors.
Such an example can be seen in the Toyokawa Shinkin Bank incident, where the story that "banks are dangerous because of bank robberies" was changed to "bank management is in danger" as it was passed from person to person, and about 2 billion yen was withdrawn in a short time, causing great confusion and actual damage. In order to prevent such situations, research is needed to better understand the mechanism of information transformation and to control the transformation.
Previous studies on rumor transmission and change have shown that the amount of rumor flow is proportional to the importance and ambiguity of the topic, that the story transformation that occurs in rumors can be roughly divided into three categories: averaging, assimilation, and emphasis, and that the function of the story affects how easily the rumor is transmitted. However, the influence of factors such as the content of the story and the method of transmission on the transformation of the story when the story is transmitted has not been clarified.
In this study, we examined the relationship between the content of the speech and the method of delivery and the speech transformation that occurs when the speech is delivered. Previous research has shown that elements such as "anxiety arousal," "interestingness," and "importance," which can be categorized as positive or negative impressions on the listener, are involved in the delivery of a story. Based on this, we investigated the influence of positive or negative impressions of the content of a story on the transformation of the story. In addition, most previous studies focused on whether the rumor was heard or not, and few focused on the method by which it was communicated. This led us to investigate the effect of the method of transmission on the transformation of the story.
To investigate this, we conducted a written communication experiment with different content plus/minus and different methods of communication. The method used was to prepare 12 kinds of sentences on 6 topics that were either beneficial or detrimental to the lives of students at Tsukuba University, and to have them communicate these sentences orally or in writing, and to record the content. The transformation of information was analyzed by comparing the contents before and after.
rom the experiments in this study, no significant relationship was found between the positive or negative content or the delivery method and the transformations that occurred. However, when we looked at each theme separately, we were able to observe transformations in several themes that were considered to be influenced by the independent variables, i.e., positive or negative content and delivery method. This suggests that the strength of the influence of story attributes and delivery method may depend on the theme of the story.
As a future direction, we believe that it is possible to clarify the factors that tend to cause transformation during transmission, which was the purpose of this study, by clarifying the differences between the themes that were considered likely to cause transformation and those that were not, and by clarifying which of these differences influenced transformation. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that tend to cause transformation during the transmission of information.
(Translated by DeepL)