"The soldier's wife told ": where do the rumors and fakes about the pandemic come from and why people spread them

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The point is that we have not strayed very far from chimpanzees in our social relationships.

Together with the coronavirus epidemic, an infodemic came into our lives. This word refers to rumors, panic stories, fakes and humor that accompany the epidemic, and in some countries - even anticipate.

We all hear and know them perfectly: “Close all windows and doors. Tonight, black helicopters will spray the city from above with disinfection, it's dangerous for people, not to go to the streets. Infa one hundred percent - the wife of a military unit from the military unit told a secret."

We perceive the spread of panic rumors and fake news rather negatively - for us it is the same disease of society as smallpox, measles or coronavirus - a disease of the body.

Undoubtedly, fake news, rumors and gossip are derivatives of panic, especially in a situation where the level of trust in the official institutions that are responsible for the health and lives of citizens drops sharply.

But let's look at the situation from the other side. Is the massive dissemination of various texts during this and all other previous epidemics, as well as natural disasters, only the result of wrong behavior? But what if we have before us an important psychological tool acquired by man in the course of evolution, only visible from the inside out in the current situation?

The great (without exaggeration) anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar is known to many as the discoverer of the "Dunbar number". In this he was helped by many years of research in various monkey communities.

Our relatives are highly social animals, especially chimpanzees. They form groups of "allies" that support each other, including for protection from predators and others of their kind. Grooming (scratching, stroking, eating lice) is the payment for help and a way to maintain social ties within the "support group".

It's nice - the endorphins are released, and the chimpanzees quietly get high. However, there is also a fly in the ointment. Grooming (that is, maintaining pure social bonds) takes a long time, up to 20 percent of the waking time. This is necessary in order to maintain social ties within your support group - it is she who will help when the predators come.

However, you cannot groom an infinite number of Facebook friends, otherwise there will not be enough time to search for food and there will be a threat of starvation.

Thus, the maximum size of a group of chimpanzees that give huskies to any one monkey because they are its friends (you get the idea) is 80 individuals.

But human ancestors broke through this ceiling. Simultaneously with the size of the brain, the limiting volume of social groups of hominids grew (according to archaeological data). Accordingly, our ancestors also needed more time for grooming, and even more difficult. How then to get food? A contradiction arises.

Dunbar suggested the following. As the size of the group grows and the complexity of grooming, language emerges. But not just as a means of communication, but as second-order grooming - a social mechanism that allows you to maintain relationships with everyone at once.

Instead of scratching the back of one, cuddling with the second and sitting next to the third on a first come, first served basis, you can simply tell everyone how “no one loves me,” and the entire support group will come and at the same time assure you of their love.

It turns out that with second-order grooming, the size of the group can be increased.

Why people have more support groups and more difficult grooming is not entirely clear. In primates, this number depends on the increase in the number of predators. More enemies means more grooming (if chimpanzees are very scared, they begin to desperately groom each other).

Perhaps the matter is in the increase in the number of enemies - early Homo, in addition to lions, was threatened by the same people, only strangers. But one way or another, the groups grew and the assertion of social ties with the help of language increased. The average size of "support groups" among modern people - about 150 people - is the same "Dunbar number".

A modern person still spends 20 percent of his active time per day on grooming. This is a phatic speech - communication not for the sake of conveying information, but for the sake of pleasure and maintaining social contacts: “Hello! Looking great, let's go have some coffee? Have you heard what they said about the amendments to the constitution? But Masha has grown terribly fat …"

Gossip is an important part of modern grooming, says Dunbar. And in all societies, without exception.

Dunbar and his colleagues studied how much time people in Western Europe and North America spend on gossip. And another, equally well-known anthropologist Marshall Salins, in his Stone Age Economy, described Australian aboriginal gatherers who devote an extremely large percentage of their time to gossip - even to the detriment of direct food extraction.

And here we come to a very important point. Why would a modern person constantly discuss “what will Princess Marya Alekseevna say”? Where does this social mechanism come from?

Gossip, chewing information about the people around us, as well as rumors about the events of the big world unite us. Moreover, the greater the external threat, the stronger the need for "social glue" (greetings, congratulations, gossip) within the group. This unites us and allows us to check whether I am in place.

Dunbar and his students measured spontaneous conversation topics between people for 30 minutes in everyday situations, during rest. In each segment there were themes "Family", "Politics" and the like. But, in fact, gossip, that is, the discussion of events happening with other people and their environment, the observed devoted about 65 percent of the conversation. And there was no correlation with gender and age (in this connection, the image of an old gossip woman must be forgotten urgently and forever).

In the first place in popularity among these spontaneous gossip was the search for advice, and in the third place was the discussion of free riders (literally "free riders"), that is, those who want to benefit from society without giving anything in return. This includes scammers and those who do not pay taxes, but teach their children in a public free school.

According to Dunbar's witty Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective, people place so much emphasis on free riders that they destroy trust and threaten the resilience of society as a whole. That is why gossip keeps returning to free riders, often overestimating the danger posed by them.

It is tempting to look at the situation in which we are all now, from this side. The epidemic is dangerous not only by the threat of infection, but also by the disintegration of social ties - the so-called social atomization. More and more countries are urging their citizens to go to voluntary (sometimes not entirely voluntary) quarantine. As a result, many of us isolated ourselves: we don’t read lectures, we don’t sit in bars, we don’t go to rallies.

Due to self-isolation and quarantine, our comfortable “support group” of about 150 people (the same “Dunbar number”) is decreasing. And we need people to whom we express support with a phatic conversation and who do the same for us.

Of course, nobody closed Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte (yet). But not all of our social connections operate in social networks and messengers, and even if virtual contacts play a big role in our life, we still need personal and lasting contact. And the destruction of ties just causes social tension.

How can we deal with this dearth of contacts? The answer from the side of macroevolution is very simple: to strengthen grooming, that is, to increase the number of gossip, or the volume of informal communication between people about what is happening in the world. Look from this side at informal communication during the Great Terror: waves of repression are going one after another, you do not know what will happen to you tomorrow, today you sit all night and wait for your arrest - nevertheless, people are whispering, quietly, but telling political jokes, although they know very well that this is a dangerous act (they were sentenced to 5 to 10 years for "anti-Soviet jokes").

American historian Robert Thurston asked Social Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941 with this very question: why in the second half of the 1930s Soviet citizens risked their freedom for jokes. The fact is that fear of the state machine of repression destroyed trust between people, and communication with the help of humorous texts not only reduced fear, but also restored this trust.

“Look at me - I'm telling a joke, which means I'm not afraid. Look - I am telling you, which means I trust you."

In the modern Russian situation, part of this informal communication is fake news coming from all sides: from the most terrible ("the government is hiding that there are hundreds of thousands of sick") to funny ("masturbation saves from the virus"). But why fakes? Think about it: a certain "young doctor from the Russian Federation Yura Klimov, who works in a hospital in Wuhan, called his friends and told how to escape the virus", "do not buy bananas, you can get infected through them", "close the windows, the city is disinfected" - all this " good advice."

True or false, these texts are circulated in order to warn a friend, relative, or neighbor. These are the same pieces of advice that Americans are constantly exchanging in the Dunbar group's gossip research (and remember that good advice was the most popular source of American informal conversation).

In a situation where confidence in the authorities is falling and people do not understand how to or should not respond to a new threat, good advice, often false or meaningless, fills our ears. And it is they who turn out to be the "superglue" cementing our disintegrating social bonds.

Fake news offers an immediate response to an over-current danger, and therefore they become successful "transgressors" - they have the ability to quickly cross any borders. A frightened mom quickly sends information to the parent chat and to all strangers in general, simply because she feels that she has the moral right to do so.

Therefore, it is fakes that not only quickly "glue" old "support groups", but also create new ones. So, on the evening of March 20, right in front of my eyes, a group of strangers began to discuss a fake about the coronavirus, quickly got to know each other and decided to go to “save” their home. That is, more danger - more social connections, just like chimpanzees.

Many have probably noticed that in the last two days, almost from the iron, a fake has been heard about scammers who, allegedly under the guise of “disinfectants from coronavirus,” rob apartments. And also the discussion of those people who, being quarantined, escape from it and thus threaten the public good.

The first is misinformation, and the second is the stories of real people dissatisfied with the conditions of forced self-isolation. But both of these stories - this is the very discussion of free riders, parasitic in public trouble. In gossip, we especially focus on what threatens the structure of society, and perhaps that is why both fakes and real stories spread so quickly.

In conclusion, it should be said that there are also positive fake news. For example, photos of swans and dolphins returning to empty Venetian canals are fake Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life. So are the stories of elephants who drank corn wine and fell dead drunk in tea fields in China. Maybe the authors who are the first to publish such posts want to get some likes on this (the swans in the Venetian channels got a million views). But people, most likely, massively distribute them for other reasons: to improve the emotional state of others - that is, for the purpose of social grooming.