Retelling urban legends.
We explored factors influencing the retelling of urban legends. As predicted by prior work, people retold truthful and scary stories. But people also retold well-known stories. This contrasts with the expectation that people would not pass on a story that everyone already knew. Also as predicted by prior work, repeating a story increased its credibility. But repeating also increased a story's importance, scariness, and likelihood of retelling. In general, contextualizing a story and increasing the number of details did not affect the likelihood of retelling a story. The exception was that details increased the likelihood of retelling a newly heard story. However, if people read a story with context or details, more contextual elements and details were included in their retellings. At the same time, people confabulated details to an equal degree no matter what type of embellishments they had read.
Fox Tree
Jean E
JE
Psychology Department, Social Sciences II, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, USA. foxtree@cats.ucsc.edu
Weldon
Mary Susan
MS
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D001290:Attitude; D008192:Deception; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D033262:Narration; D011336:Probability; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States; D014705:Verbal Behavior