Analyzing rumors, gossip, and urban legends through their conversational properties.

The study of rumors has a long history in all the major social sciences, including psychology, social anthropology, geography, sociology, sociolinguistics, and folklore (Allport & Lepkin, 1945; Allport & Postman, 1945, 1947; Arno, 1980; Besnier, 1994; Brunvand, 1979, 1984; Cantril, 1940; Cornwell & Hobbs, 1992; Cox, 1970; Lienhardt, 1975; Neubauer, 1999; Rosnow, 1991). Research has also been applied to practical problems of rumor-mongering (Bordia & Rosnow, 1998; Declerque, Tsui, Abul-Ata, & Barcelona, 1986; Deodhar, Yemul, & Banerjee, 1998; Difonzo, Bordia, & Rosnow, 1994; Fine, 1986; Harrington & Beilby, 1995; Herr, Kardes, & Kim, 1991; lyer & Debevec, 1991; Prasad, 1935, 1950; Rutenberg & Watkins, 1997; Scanlon, 1977; Singh, 1990; Sinha, 1952; Tishkov, 1995).

While the study of rumors, and more recently the related phenomena of gossip and urban legends, has been ongoing, the theory and explanations put forward to understand these phenomena have been weaker, we believe. We argue that the two major reasons that have been advanced for the occurrence of rumors--imparting information and relieving anxiety--are the wrong way around. We propose instead a conversational approach that better reflects what is known about rumors, urban legends, and gossip. The conversational approach also predicts some hybrid versions of stories.

Traditional Theories of Rumors and Other Stories

Allport and Postman (1947)

One of the most influential theories of its day was Allport and Postman's (1947). They were concerned with rumors during World War II, and the effect these had on the morale of both troops and civilians. Their theory was based on two assumptions: (a) that people exert effort to find meaning in things and events and (b) that, when faced with ambiguity in an important matter, people try to find some meaning by the retelling of related rumors. This meant that rumor importance and rumor ambiguity were the key variables that predicted whether a rumor would be transmitted or not.

Most of these ideas were based on Bartlett's (1932) famous series of experiments showing that as materials were passed on in conversations, people appeared to try to make sense of them or find meaning in them. When given meaningless or ambiguous figures to pass on, people made them into something more meaningful. For example, an ambiguous picture would be passed on (verbally) as "face." Bartlett's idea was expanded by Allport and Postman: As rumors were passed on, they would become leveled (shorter and more concise), sharpened (details left out), and assimilated (more coherent and interesting to the listeners). Notice that this leaves the "finding meaning" as an inner or individualistic process, as inherent cognitive biases. The leveling, sharpening, and assimilation occur because of the cognitive makeup of people--what happens when people process information. We come back to this later as a major unchallenged assumption of both Bartlett's and Allport's reasoning.

Rosnow (1991)

Rosnow (1991) revised and slightly reworked Allport and Postman's ideas. Rosnow claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous or uncertain events, and because talking about them helped "catharsis" and reduced associated anxiety. He made four factors important for rumor transmission: rumors must be outcome-relevant for the listener, must increase personal anxiety, must have generalized uncertainty (like ambiguity), and must have some credibility. Note that the first two factors put the cause even more "into" the person than Allport and Postman's factors, because they are direct properties of the person. The credibility factor was offered to make the model more realistic, to stop the prediction that even totally fictitious rumors with no credibility would get passed on. Notice, however, that in fact other totally unrealistic stories such as urban legends and horror stories do get passed around. We come back to this point later.

Rosnow's explanation was more closely related to Festinger's (1957) ideas than those of Bartlett (1932). Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance proposed that if people had contradictory or ambiguous cognitions, then the contradictions produced an inner anxiety or dissonance and so people would work to change this situation. Telling stories would be one way to reduce such dissonance. It should be noted here that Festinger's theory also predicts that people should not tell horrific or anxiety-inducing stories at all, because the aim is to reduce anxiety about events. There are many such horrific or anxiety-inducing stories commonly passed around, however, and people seem to enjoy hearing them.

Shibutani (1966)

A sociologist, Shibutani (1996), provided a somewhat more social account of rumors by describing them as collective efforts after meaning:</p> <pre> In this book rumor will be regarded as a recurrent form of communication through which men caught together in an ambiguous

situation attempt to construct a meaningful interpretation of it by pooling their intellectual resources. It might be regarded as a form of collective problem-solving. (p. 17, italics in the original) </pre> <p>This has many similarities to Allport and Rosnow, with language use referenced as communication, with ambiguous or uncertain situations needing explanation, and with effort after meaning as a driver. The major difference is that this is a collective effort after meaning by which groups of people "explain" ambiguous or uncertain events, rather than an individual or cognitive effort.

A New Theory of Rumors and Other Stories

We would like to turn these theories on their head at this point, and suggest how rumors are told not to reduce the inherent horror and anxiety, but precisely because they are anxiety-provoking and ambiguous--because these properties make for good conversations. By looking closer at the conversational (discursive) properties of rumors we can better understand their role.

Why Tell Stories at All?

Before appealing to catharsis and imparting knowledge as reasons for telling stories, a range of other functions for story telling have to be considered. Most of these can be subsumed under the categories of influencing listeners to like you, maintaining social relationships with listeners, keeping their attention, and maintaining status with listeners (Cheshire, 2000; Guerin, 2003, 2004). To see this, we remind ourselves of how important groups and relationships are to living our lives. Everything we do requires the involvement of other people, directly or indirectly. What we find, then, is a huge range of ways of talking that promote the formation and maintenance of social relationships (Guerin, 2003, 2004). People make jokes, tell stories, engage in collaborative conversations, talk about work, talk about the weather, complain, seek controversy, tell histories, denigrate enemies, praise each other, and talk about television. You can also increase your status, "coolness," or reputation with witty remarks, impressive pontifications, sensible help, useful evidence, dirty jokes, interesting banter, and the like. Rumors, gossip, and urban legends, therefore, figure as just a few of many forms of relationship-enhancing talk.

The switch in theory is to explain the use of these forms of talk not by some inner property of the speaker--anxiety reduction, meaning making, or cognitive processing--but by the social properties that occur when they are used. Telling these stories can mutually enhance social relationships or improve a speaker's status within a relationship, and those outcomes alone are enough reason to explain why they would be used. Different forms of talk might be differentiated only because they have different conversational properties and effects on social relationships.

What are Social Properties of Rumors, Gossip, and Urban Legends?

Table 1 sets out some suggested conversational properties of talk, illustrated by four forms--rumors, urban legends, gossip, and "serious knowledge" (Guerin, 2003, 2004). We have included the latter for reasons addressed shortly. Other forms of talk could have been addressed but are left out, such as complaining, conspiracy stories, "sick disaster jokes," and regular humor.

These categorizations are not meant to be definitive but are our suggestions to help prompt further research in this area. What we need to begin analyzing are the conversational properties of these forms of talk that appeal to others, have them like the speaker, have them just attend to the speaker, and have them raise the speaker to higher status. The main generic social properties we have included in our preliminary Table 1 are that the story (a) be of interest and consequence to the listener, (b) be difficult to dismiss immediately but also credible, and (c) be attention grabbing or novel. There are different forms of these properties and trade-offs among them. For example, urban legends are not usually credible or of personal consequence to the listeners, but this is traded off with properties of being much more engaging and attention grabbing, and being in a narrative form with a story plot that encourages listening. Short stories are usually more appreciated in conversations, but this can be traded off by the story having personal consequences to the listener, by allowing interruptions and collaboration by listeners, and by the use of a narrative form (Guerin, 2003, 2004). As a third example, many stories are barely credible, but they can still function as good conversation if they have horror, joking, or scandalous content to assuage the listener.

Another important conversational property of these story forms, one not covered by previous theories, is whether you can be the first one to tell them (Guerin, 2003, 2004). Being the first to tell a story has a huge "conversational cash value," whereas telling a story to people who have already heard it does not. So this property crosses all these forms and people try to be the first to tell a new rumor, gossip story, or urban legend.

One theoretical implication of this way of viewing such stories is that no essential difference exists between the story forms themselves, no clear and discernable definitions. Rumors, gossip, and urban legends are merely different ways of getting and keeping a listener's attention, and are not independently definable in themselves except for their particular conglomerate of conversational properties.

Examples of the Social Properties of Rumors, Gossip, and Urban Legends

To give some substance to our preliminary analysis of social properties in Table 1, we present some examples. Rosnow and Fine (1976) present a typical rumor from war:</p> <pre> The railroad has been mined. Bridges have been blown up. Hordes of fanatical Chinese are ambushed to massacre the Marines ... These and similar reports reached the

small detachment of United States Marines in June, 1900, as we were about to start from Tangku, China, to the relief of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. (p. 9) </pre> <p>Taking this as our example, we can see that it is of interest to the soldiers, of personal consequence to them, is credible although difficult to verify, is short, is attention grabbing, and is presumably novel by the sounds of the report. Although we do not have the individual rumors that make up this report, it seems that the rumor is not presented in a story form with beginning, middle, and end, but as a pithy statement of consequence.

Donavan, Mowen, and Chakraborty (2001) present a typical urban legend, one that appeared on e-mail:</p> <pre> Watch out this is for real!!!!! I just heard about a lady who was asked to sniff a bottle of perfume another woman was selling for $8.00. (In a mall parking lot) She was told the story that it was her last bottle of perfume and that it regularly sells for $49.00, but she was getting rid of it for only $8.00 ... sounds legitimate? It's what the victim thought, but when she awoke she found out that her car had been moved to another parking area and she was missing all the money that was in her wallet (a total of $800.00). Pretty steep for a sniff of perfume! Anyway, the perfume wasn't perfume at all, it was some kind of ether or strong substance to cause anyone who breathes the fumes to black out. </pre> <p>Here we have a story that is of general interest to people, but of little personal interest or consequence so it needs more. It is not really credible and difficult to verify in any case, is long, and is ambiguous in places. However, the story makes up for these deficits by having a story plot of sorts, having horror and attention-getting elements, is novel, humorous possibly to some listeners, and is unexpected.

Haviland (1977) presents an example of gossip, from fieldwork carried out in a hamlet in Zinacantan, Mexico.</p> <pre> "Is it true that old Maria divorced Manual?" "Yes. She complained that she awoke every morning with a wet skirt. Old Manual used to piss himself every night, just like a child." "When he was drunk, you mean?"

"No, even when he was sober. 'How it stinks!' she said." (p. 188) </pre> <p>Here we can see talk that is of interest to listeners, and perhaps of consequence and deals with someone known to them. The story is credible but difficult to verify, and has scandalous, novel, humorous, and unexpected elements. It is short although it could have been dressed up with a story line if more elements were added.

These examples should give the reader an idea of the conversational or social properties of Table 1. The stories produce different effects on listeners, and they function through different combinations of the properties.

Hybrids of Rumors, Gossip, and Urban Legends

This model predicts no essential differences between rumors, gossip, and urban legends, and this means that hybrid forms might be found. Indeed, in unpublished data, we have found a form of "celebrity gossip" that shares only some of the social properties of "ordinary gossip" (Miyazaki & Guerin, 2000). The lives of celebrities are not directly known to us and of no immediate impact on our lives (beyond being able to talk about them), and are not personally anxiety increasing to us. Such gossip usually works (with the appropriate audience), however, because most people know of those involved, and because there are scandalous, joking, or horrific aspects added to engage the listeners. Even to someone with no interest in the lives of celebrities, telling a humorous or scandalous story about them can engage the listener. Such stories about people we will never meet can also blossom if you tell them first, if they are juicy, if they can be told to a wide range of listeners, if there are few consequences for telling the stories (they are safe to tell), and if there is little monitoring of their truth so they can be embellished (less likely with a gossip about a mutual acquaintance).

Other hybrids can also be found, including those that do not work in conversation. Some stories do not get repeated simply because they fail to interest listeners (too long, not scandalous enough). Others get a new twist or embellishment put into them and keep the listeners' attention, but that twist depends on local knowledge or conditions so they do not get widely spread and recorded--"You needed to be there to appreciate this story ..." The forms that are commonly identified are merely those that use some generic property that works across a range of groups. Others happen regularly, but some fail and others depend upon a local context of conversation.

The final hybrid is that of telling "serious" knowledge or facts. Most theories of "social knowledge" work with an assumption that telling each other facts is about learning true knowledge through acting as lay scientists (Kelley & Michela, 1980) or through a form of catharsis or uncertainty-reduction cognitive mechanism (Guerin, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2004; Noscovici, 1984). Although this might be true sometimes, we must also recognize, and therefore analyze correctly (Guerin, 2004), that many of the ways we tell facts and knowledge to each other is really about maintaining social relationships. We should therefore be able to analyze in these cases many of the same properties from Table 1 (e.g., Chapman & Lupton, 1994).

We do not just tell each other about medical facts, for example, so as to reduce our collective uncertainty about how the body works: "Did you see that they found a gene linking red hair with schizophrenia?" Instead, we dress them up to be horrific, entertaining, with a story plot or with humor, and above all we try to be the first to tell a new medical story that emerges from the media. So even the telling of "serious" knowledge, or establishing facts, can really be about establishing and maintaining our social relationships and all that follows from those. This needs to be taken into account when analyzing conversations.

Explaining Rumors, Gossip, and Urban Legend Conversations

Going back to the theories of these forms of stories, we can now turn them on their heads. Allport and Postman (1947) suggested that rumor importance and ambiguity affect rumor transmission because of cognitive properties of searching after meaning. By our theory, however, these work because of their social properties; importance and ambiguity are good properties for social conversation (Guerin, 2003, 2004). Allport and Postman (1947) also suggested that rumors change through being leveled (shorter and more concise), sharpened (details get left out), and assimilated (more coherent and interesting to the listeners). Again, these are all social properties of conversations, not of the stories themselves or of speakers and their cognitive processes. Leveling, sharpening, and assimilation make for good story telling, rather than as a mechanical side effect of a cognitive system. We level, sharpen, and assimilate material for the benefit of making a good story.

Similarly, Rosnow's (1991) factors can also be turned around. Rumors were said to be transmitted if they were outcome-relevant for the listener, had personal anxiety, had generalized uncertainty (like ambiguity), and were credible. These are also factors that make stories good to tell and repeat to others, because any anxiety and uncertainty is utilized in the stories to make the listener attend and like the story. Indeed, this is the paradox we made earlier about Rosnow's and Festinger's theories--that if telling horror and anxiety-inducing stories lead to anxiety then we should stop telling them altogether. They are, however, some of the most interesting and attention-grabbing stories.

We pointed out earlier that our theory differs from Rosnow's in that our theory shows how people tell rumors that are not credible, when Rosnow's theory predicts that they would not be told. In our view, rumors that are not credible can be passed around audiences but they would need to be dressed up in some other way to keep our listeners. We would have to add a story plot to it, add new features that were interesting, add new reasons why it might be of personal importance to the listener ("This could happen to you too, you know!"), or add some humor. But, in doing this to a low-credibility rumor, we have actually created a hybrid from that might not be recognizable any longer as a rumor. This is why stories should be analyzed in terms of their conversational properties rather than trying to fit them into a prearranged, nameable form.

More explicitly in terms of the explanations of rumors and the like, we suggest first that instead of anxious, ambiguous, or consequential situations causing or leading to rumors, the ambiguity and consequentiality of a situation are utilized for social conversation: Instead of putting effort into seeking meaningful interpretations of ambiguous or consequential events, people are putting effort into making good conversation and therefore good social relationships, and are using whatever conversational properties are available in the current material and the local context to do this. Second, we suggest that Bartlett's (1932) "effort after meaning" is an "effort after good social relationships," thus making the "cognitive processing" a truly social process. Finally, we suggest that people do not reduce anxiety by retelling stories, but rather, they utilize the anxiety to work toward good social relationships (Guerin, 2001a, 2001b). Similar arguments can be made about the "dissonance-removing" functions of Festinger (1957) and the uses made of that theory (Guerin, 2001b).

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have argued that the explanations for telling rumors, gossip, urban legends, and other forms of stories, need to be turned around. Instead of telling such stories because they reduce anxiety or help us find meaning in uncertain events, the tellers utilize these very properties of anxiety and uncertainty to make a good story and improve their social relationships. This means that there are no intrinsic forms of stories, but a range of conversational properties that can be utilized in diverse ways. We do not recognize some forms with labels because they involve local contexts to work and are therefore not repeatable over large populations, or because they do not even succeed as good stories and never get repeated. We also suggested that, in many cases, talking about "serious" knowledge and facts functions in the same way and must be analyzed accordingly.

In theoretical terms, the arguments here are important because they provide a way to escape internal or cognitive explanations and make a truly social explanation of such phenomena. The "cognitive" processes that have historically been used to explain these stories can be derived from social properties of conversation. For example, leveling, sharpening, and assimilation of stories (Allport & Postman, 1947; Bartlett, 1932) occur to make the story work better with audiences rather than as a side effect of the way our "cognitive" system works. This change in theorizing can be applied more widely than just the study of rumors (Guerin, 2001b, 2003, 2004) and should have wide ramifications through psychology.

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BERNARD GUERIN and YOSHIHIKO MIYAZAKI

University of Waikato

Bernard Guerin is now at the School of Psychology, University of South Australia, Adelaide 5000, Australia. (E-mail: bguerin@waikato.ac.nz).

Table 1 Categorization of Rumors, Urban Legends, and Gossip into Twelve
Conversational Properties That Gain Attention or Promote Relationships

 "Serious"
 Rumors Urban legends Gossip knowledge

Is of general interest [check] [check] [check]
 to most listeners
Of personal consequence and [check] [check]
 interest to listeners
Deals with persons known [check]
 to speaker or listener
Truth difficult to verify [check] [check] [check] [check]
Must be credible despite [check] [check] [check]
 ambiguities
Can be ambiguous [check] [check] [check]
Short or long? Short Long Short Short
Uses a story plot [check]
Attention gained with [check] [check] [check]
 horror or scandal
New or novel [check] [check] [check] [check]
Can be humorous [check] [check]
Unusual or unexpected [check] [check] [check]

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Author:	Guerin, Bernard; Miyazaki, Yoshihiko
Publication:	The Psychological Record
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Jan 1, 2006
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