Rumor Has It Wrong

Illustration by Geraldine Nuñez

By Sarah Ramsden

Staff Reporter

October 2021

A rumor is defined as a currently circulating story or report of an uncertain truth. And of course, there are many rumors inside of a high school with 1700 students.

On Wednesday, September 8, students were held under a soft lockdown for three hours while police investigated an anonymous threat from outside of the school. However, it didn’t take long for the rumors to start spreading, and a video of a dog finding a gun in the bushes was soon all over Snapchat.

Junior Carsan Truman commented that people should stop and think before they post stuff. “That video of the dog in the bushes was taken out of context. What I heard was that it was an actual gun, but the police were using it to test the dog.”

Truman added that nothing about the situation really made sense to her, and that it’s easy to believe the rumors because they offer an explanation for uncertain situations.

Some people might say that those who spread rumors do so with intentional malice, or that someone is “gullible” if they believe a rumor, but rumors are an integral part of everyone’s daily life, even if they don’t realize it.

An article from Psychology Today put it this way, “We are fundamentally social beings and we possess an irrepressible instinct to make sense of the world. Put these ideas together and we get shared sensemaking: We make sense of life together. Rumor is perhaps the quintessential shared sensemaking activity.”

In times of uncertainty, humans are naturally going to start rumors as they try to comprehend their situation.

Why does any of this matter to high school students? Well, when potentially confusing or frightening situations arise, consider the context and the source where you are getting the information from. Don’t be too skeptical, though. It’s human nature to trust what you hear from others.

At the end of the day, rumors are always going to be a part of people’s lives, helped along by social media.

Officer Halvorsen, a resource officer at the school, said that social media could be very frustrating. “It makes it harder for students to learn, because it’s very accessible and very instantaneous. That makes social media very hard for us to mediate,” Halvorsen commented.