Re: Allport & Postman's "The Psychology of Rumor" (1947)

From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue 17 Feb 2004 - 03:01:02 GMT

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    on 2/16/04 8:02 PM, Keith Henson at hkhenson@rogers.com wrote:

    > At 08:32 PM 16/02/04 +0000, derek wrote:
    >> Just come across an amazing old book. Allport GW &
    >> Postman L (1947) The Psychology of Rumor. Henry Holt
    >> & Co., New York. Just about everything you would want
    >> to know about fast acting verbal behavioural contagions.
    >
    > Back in 1996 on alt.memetics I wrote:
    >
    > "I once saw something like this in (I think) a book called Rumor. I have a
    > copy of this page somewhere. It was a visual/drawing version of the game
    > "telephone." It stared with a rather stylized drawing of an owl which was
    > serial copied by a number of people. The drawing degenerated in a few
    > panels with the hand copy process to something very hard to figure out,
    > and then jumped to become a cat. After that, the rest of the panels were
    > clearly cats.
    >
    > "There is a name for stable attractors of this sort, but I can't think of
    > it at the moment."
    >
    > Could you take a quick look through the book and see if this has the owl to
    > cat page? If it does, I sure would appreciate your making a jpg of the page.
    >
    > Keith Henson

    There's such a page in F. C. Bartlett's 1932, *Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology*, Cambridge U Press, p. 180.

    Bill B

    >
    >
    > ===============================================================
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    > see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
    >

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit



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