A rumour may easily be perceived as a solution, one that is quite circumstantial and wholly marked by mental improvisation, to a problem of collective relevance. Therefore, this paper argues that, antecedent to the rumour, there existed a need to know. Such a way of looking at things permits an advance in parsimony, since there must exist fewer originating ‘problems’ than attested ‘solutions’. On the other hand, this point of view installs rumour in the function of a revelation or symptom (...) of a social state which encompasses it. Finally, this perspective reconnects the production and development of rumours to the set of cognitive mechanisms of the computational type. One rediscovers therein the continuity of processes of social thought, and rumours cease to be confined to their status of monstrous singularities. (shrink)

Pour une certaine psychologie sociale, la société n'a que des effets contextuels sur les processus de traitement de l'information. Ainsi la communication n'est-elle « sociale » que demanière conjoncturelle ou alors banalement pléonastique . Dans cette conception, la cognition individuelle est fondatrice et finalisatrice, première et dernière. Mais nombre de travaux suggèrent au contraire l'équivalence de la communication, de la cognition et de la sociabilité: parler de l'un de ces termes, c'est nécessairement parler des deux autres; travailler l'un, dans le (...) cadre d'un dispositif théorique et/ou empirique rigoureux, c'est nécessairement travailler les deux autres. Il en résulte des effets de connaissance, souvent inattendus et parfois subversifs, de la psychologie sociale.In some social psychology constructs, society holds only contextual influences over human information processing. Therefore, communication is considered to be "social" only in a cyclical fashion or else in a pleonastic manner . Yet a number of works conversely suggest the equivalent nature of communication, cognition and sociability. When considering one of these terms, we are necessarily referring to the other two; when working with one of them in the framework of a theoretical or empirical apparatus, we are inevitably working with the other two. The consequences of this view of social psychology are often unforeseen and at times even subversive. (shrink)