The strange truth about fiction

Do you have any references about human perception of blue-red versus monochrome gradients? Would be interested to have good recommendations for such cases.

Because they may not care, and they may not have recorded this information for the purpose of social engineering?

There's value in studying the dynamics of processes without any intention to manipulate them.

A lot of rumors are the result of poor understanding or misinterpretation. For example, there was a big rumor a year or two back that the US government was buying hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, sparking fears of everything from a conspiracy to drive up prices to an imminent imposition of martial law. The basis of the rumor was a government solicitation to bid on ammunition pricing, so that the government could lock in its ammunition purchases for the next few years at a fixed and predictable price, rather than being subject to spot price fluctuations which would make budgeting more difficult and possibly result in higher costs. However, to understand that that the government was looking for (essentially) a call option required a basic knowledge of finance and a fairly high level of reading ability to deal with the 'officialese'. It's not surprising that many people misinterpreted a request for a pricing guarantee as a solicitation for actual supply. There was also a misunderstanding of how much ammunition the government actually uses, with people who cheerfully fire off hundreds of rounds during their own practice sessions overlooking the fact that federal employees who carry firearms also have to take part in training and practice sessions where they expend large quantities of ammunition. More here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp

Trolls shouldn't need much explanation; a tradition of spreading outlandish or silly rumors is as old as the hills, and for trolls every day is April 1st.

Then you have people with a vested interest in spreading rumors of one sort or another, often for political ends. Negative rumors about 'Obamacare' have been widespread in recent years for obvious reasons, likewise people on the left often expressed their animus towards the previous Republican administration by making up negative stories reflecting their view of how that administration would behave, or what would motivate them in the case of some otherwise random-seeming fact.

EDIT: here's an outstanding example right here on HN, today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667068

There are a great many people who are not especially concerned with truth, but with shaping people's behavior in order to bring about a certain result - whether that is getting people to buy a product or a book, or to change the price of a financial asset, or to create a more favorable political environment etc.

A lot of myths started with a grain of truth. "He left it in the woods chained to a tree" -> "He went away, and left it in the woods chained to a tree" -> "He went away, I think to war, and left it in the woods chained to a tree" -> etc.

A friend spends a lot of time on Facebook and, whenever she wants to tell me some fact or a joke I always ask 'is this a Facebook joke/fact?'. Clearly if it is a 'Facebook joke' I won't find it funny, I will just have to suffer boredom, hence I ask first so I can be prepared for some soul destroying trivial nonsense.

In social networks there is a sort of recommendation from a personal friend that comes with stuff. So, some mis-fact-rumour just has to get past that threshold of convincing-ness, thereafter it can go on viral.

Some rumours start as one story that gets mis-interpreted and then it spreads, there is nothing that the original source can do about it. We all do it '640K RAM, enough', 'Al Gore, invented the interwebs' and so on...