The rumor chain activity

Mr. Anthony asked fro 4 volunteers to recite a story he has read to each other. He asked three of the volunteers first to leave the class and told a story about a hijacker to the first volunteer, then he called the others volunteer in one by one and let them recite the story to each other from what they heard from the previous volunteer.

The Result was as follow:

The flight information was lost
The Hijacker was called terrorist
The revolutionary army was lost
The cockpit was called the pilot cabin
The name of the pilot was lost and the number of pilot was two at the end
The name of the gun was changed from .357 Magnum to magma gun
The information about the radio was lost
The action of the angry passengers was lost

From the demonstration he concludes that the story got more and more condensed as it went from a volunteer to another. Some information got leveled, or cut off. Some was sharpened, or emphasized, and some information was added through assimilation, or changes in detail to fit the subject to the background of knowledge, which in this case was the number of pilots. This explains the concept of gossiping, that the news get more vague and dangerous as it spread.