Urban Legends Thrive by Playing on Our Emotions

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Monday December 10 1:20 PM ET

Urban Legends Thrive by Playing on Our Emotions

By Schorr

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Did Ozzy Osbourne really bite the head off a bat?

Did Mcs once use ground up earthworms in its hamburger meat? Is Halloween

candy really tainted with razor blades?

Whether or not these urban legends-popular in the 1970s--are actually true, they

have passed into the public consciousness largely because they elicit strong

emotional reactions such as fear and disgust, according to one group of

researchers.

``Legends are likely to survive and spread when they provoke any strong

emotional reaction: joy, disgust, fear, anger,'' Chip Heath, an associate

profession of organizational behavior in the graduate school of business at

Stanford University, told Reuters Health.

Urban legends are stories often unverifiable or false that appear to be

plausible and enter the public discourse. Urban legends can be positive (one

popular e-mail promised those who forwarded it would get $1,000 from Microsoft's

Bill Gates (news - web sites)) or negative (one urban legend rumored that gang

members were randomly slaying those who flashed their carlights at those driving

with their lights off as part of a gang initiation).

``We got interested in urban legends because they survive despite the odds,''

Heath explained. ``No ad dollars support them. Experts are eager to debunk them.

Yet they still survive and spread. One big reason they do so is that they play

on our emotions.''

Heath and colleagues hoped to empirically test whether urban legends that do

elicit strong reactions were more likely to be passed along from one person to

the next. The researchers focused on the emotion disgust because about a quarter

of urban legends contain some element of disgust.

The researchers selected 12 popular urban legends and manipulated the level of

disgust elicited by the story. For example, in one version, a man about to drink

a can of soda discovers it contains a rat, discovers it contained a rat after

drinking some of it, or actually consumes pieces of the animal.

The results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

(news - web sites).

The researchers found that the college students enrolled in the study said they

were more likely to pass along the highly revolting version than the less

disgusting versions, even when controlling for factors such as whether the

stories were considered to be plausible or informative.

In a follow-up study, the researchers also looked at urban legends posted on

various Web sites and found that the stories with more themes of disgust were

indeed swapped more frequently.

The researchers note that mindlessly passing along urban legends is not

harmless. Stories of Halloween candy tainted with poison and razor blades

diminishes the community-fostering tradition of trick-or-treating, they note.

``Be skeptical whenever some story or 'fact' makes you feel a strong emotional

reaction,'' Heath advises. ``We can avoid lots of day-to-day worries if we think

twice before passing along information that seems too awful to be true.''

SOURCE: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2001;81:1028-1041.