How Narratives and Evidence Influence Rumor Belief in Conflict Zones: Evidence from Syria

Abstract

Armed conflict creates a context of high uncertainty and risk, where accurate and verifiable information is extremely difficult to find. This is a prime environment for unverified information—rumors—to spread. Meanwhile, there is insufficient understanding of exactly how rumor transmission occurs within conflict zones. I address this with an examination of the mechanisms through which people evaluate new information. Building on findings from research on motivated reasoning, I argue that elite-driven narrative contests—competitions between elites to define how civilians should understand conflict—increase the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction. Civilians respond by attempting thorough evaluations of new information that they hope will allow them to distinguish evidence from narratives. These evaluations tend to involve some combination of self-evaluation, evaluation of the source, and collective sense-making. I examine this argument using over 200 interviews with Syrian refugees conducted in Jordan and Turkey. My findings indicate that people are usually unable to effectively distinguish evidence from narratives, so narrative contests are powerful drivers of rumor evaluation. Still, civilian mechanisms of rumor evaluation do constrain what propaganda elites can spread. These findings contribute to research on civil war, narrative formation, and information diffusion.

Information battleground: Conflict perceptions motivate the belief in and sharing of misinformation about the adversary

“…Reminiscent of the Cold War, the Russian state has been blamed for weaponizing false news to interfere with elections in America, France, and Great Britain (e.g., [ 4 , 5 ]) and for flooding Eastern Europe with online fabricated news to drive down support for the European Union and NATO (e.g., [ 6 , 7 ]). In the context of geopolitical and armed conflicts, the narratives spread by competing state elites can make it difficult for citizens to distinguish truth from falsehoods (see, for example, [ 8 ]). In the context of Eastern Europe, digital disinformation campaigns reflect deeper geopolitical cleavages and have intensified the conflict between countries over the years.…”

Mobile phone data reveal the effects of violence on internal displacement in Afghanistan

“…This is consistent with survey-based evidence, which finds that the perceived threat of violence or presence of armed forces is sufficient to cause displacement, independent of the actual exposure to violence 7 – 9 . Rumours and word-of-mouth may also play a role: prior work suggests that information about violence spreads quickly 56 , 57 —including unverified rumours 58 —and that rumours may prompt people to take action to protect themselves 59 .…”

Violence, co-optation, and postwar voting in Guatemala

“…Data comes from the National Geographic Institute of Guatemala (Segeplán, 2019) and corresponds to the road network around 1970. 7 It constitutes the best approximation for the period of interest, namely, road infrastructure right before the conflict escalated in the late 1970s.…”

“…During the civil war, information about wartime events in Guatemala was probably very limited, so beliefs about wartime events were formed in a context of high uncertainty. Along these lines, recent research suggests that rumor evaluation in wartime contexts is largely determined by surrounding social networks (Schon, 2021). Active judgment of wartime events is thus very much intertwined with the "narrative contests" that unfold in a situation where state actors are actively trying to spread misinformation about what happened during the war.…”

“…This example is far from unique, as in many postwar contexts there is a controversy about blame attribution, where active political actors take an active role in trying to define the mainstream discourse. The fact that a civil war is usually a high-uncertainty context makes it an ideal space for rumors and propaganda to spread (Schon, 2021), a situation that in many cases strongly defines the postwar context.…”