Reporting what you see and hear

        Daniel Chandler

        Whenever an event is open to divergent interpretations, reporting it involves transforming it. The selection, retention, reporting and retelling of events routinely involves several kinds of transformations. All of these involve simplifying events to make them more meaningful in terms of personal interests, needs and experience. The process is exaggerated where memory and retelling are involved, but it is already at work in the selectivity involved in the initial perception of an event.

        Levelling

        Contrary to the popular idea that rumours ‘snowball’, beoming more elaborate in the telling, psychological studies suggest that retelling tends to make accounts shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told. There is an increasing tendency to use fewer words. Levelling is the selective process by which certain details are omitted. However, items of particular interest to the reporters, which confirm their expectations or help to structure their reports, do tend to persist.

        Sharpening

        Sharpening is the reciprocal selective process of levelling. Alongside the loss of some details, there also tends to be a pointing-up of a limited number of details which caught the individual’s attention, often including attention-grabbing words. Temporal sharpening involves a tendency to describe events in the present tense. Movement is often emphasized or introduced. Items prominent because of their relative size or quantity tend to be retained. Labels tend to persist. Primacy effects may lead to the retention of items coming first in a series. Familiar symbols are also likely to be retained. Explanations may be introduced, especially to produce ‘closure’.

        Assimilation

        Underlying the selective processes of levelling and sharpening, and of transpositions, importations and other transformations involved in retellings, Allport and Postman (1945) argue, is the process of assimilation. This involves the influence of habits, interests and sentiments on reporters and listeners. Aspects of a story are sharpened or levelled to make them more consistent with what is seen as the principal theme of the story, thus making the story more coherent and ‘well-rounded’. Items relevant to the theme may be imported and those irrelevant to the theme may be omitted. Apparent ‘gaps’ may be filled. And some details may be changed to make them more consistent.

        • Assimilation by condensation involves fusing several details into one.
        • Assimilation to expectation involves transforming details into what one’s habits of thought suggest they usually are.
        • Assimilation to linguistic habits involves fitting phenomena into the familiar frameworks of conventional verbal categories.
        • Assimilation to interest involves retellings from the perspective of the particular occupational interests or roles of the teller (especially where these interests are shared with listeners), giving primary attention to details which reflect such interests.
        • Assimilation to prejudice may simply involve assimilation to expectation or to linguistic categories, but it may also involve deep emotional assimilation to hostility based on racial, class or personal prejudices.

        Source

        • Allport, Gordon W. & Leo J. Postman (1945): ‘The basic psychology of rumor’, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II 8: 61- 81. Reprinted in Eleanor E. Maccoby, Theodore M. Newcomb & Eugene L. Hartley (Eds.) (1959): Readings in Social Psychology (3rd edn.). London: Methuen

        Daniel Chandler, UWA December 1995