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

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 is 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 panic rumors and fake news are rather negative - 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 when the level of trust in the official institutions responsible for the health and life of citizens is sharply falls.

But let's look at the situation from the other side. Is it possible that the mass distribution of various texts during this and all other previous epidemicsas well as natural disasters just 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 in the current situation visible from the inside out?

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. Pay for help and way to support social connections within the "support group" is grooming (scratching, stroking, eating lice).

It's nice - endorphins are released, and chimpanzees quietly get high. However, there is also a fly in the ointment. Grooming (that is, purely maintaining social bonds) takes a long time, up to 20 percent of the waking time. This is necessary in order to maintain social bonds 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 to die of hunger.

Thus, the maximum size of a group of chimpanzees who 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 relations all 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 just tell everyone how “no one loves me”, and the whole support group will come and at the same time assure you of their love.

It turns out that with second-order grooming, the group size 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 the chimp is strong scare, they begin to groom each other desperately).

Perhaps the point is an 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 phatic speech - communication is 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 is terrible got fat…»

Gossip is an important part of modern grooming, Dunbar says. 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, no less famous anthropologist Marshall Salins, in his "Stone Age Economics" described Aboriginal gatherers of Australia, who devote an extremely large percentage of their time to gossip - even to the detriment of direct extraction of food.

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 on 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 more "social glue" is needed (hello, congratulations, gossip) within the group. This unites us and allows us to check whether I am in place.

Dunbar and his students measured spontaneous conversations 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 the old gossip woman must be forgotten urgently and forever).

The first place in popularity among these spontaneous gossip was the search for advice, and the third - the discussion free riders (literally - "free riders"), that is, those who want to benefit from society without giving anything instead. This includes scammers and those who does not pay taxesbut teaches children in a public free school.

According to witty reasoningGossip in Evolutionary Perspective Dunbar, the reason people place so much emphasis on free riders is 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 do not read lectures, in bars we don't sit, 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, no one 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 to deal with this lack 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 go one after another, you do not know what will happen to you tomorrow, today you sit all night and you expect to be arrested - nevertheless, people are whispering, quietly, but telling political jokes, although they know perfectly well that this is a dangerous act (from 5 to 10 years they were given for “anti-Soviet anecdotes ").

American historian Robert Thurston wonderedSocial Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941 precisely this question: why in the second half of the 1930s Soviet citizens risked their freedom for the 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 lowered 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 virus "). But why exactly 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 from the virus "," do not buy bananas, through them you can get infected "," close the windows, the city is disinfected "- all these are" good advice. "

True or false, these texts are circulated in order to warn a friend, relative, neighbor. These are the same tips that Americans are constantly exchanging in the group's gossip research. Dunbar (and I want to remind you that good advice was the most popular content of informal conversations Americans).

In a situation where confidence in the authorities falls and people do not understand how to or should not react to a new threat, good advice, often false or meaningless, fills our ears. And it is they who prove 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. Scared mom quickly sends information to parental chat and in general to all strangers 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 "save" their home. That is, more danger - more social connections, just like chimpanzees.

Many have probably noticed that in the past 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 a discussion of those people who, being put into quarantine, 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 the 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 this 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, photographs of swans and dolphins returning to empty Venetian canals are fakeFake 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 are likely to distribute them en masse for other reasons: to improve emotional state others - that is, for the purpose of social grooming.