10 Realities About Urban Legends

Modern culture is steeped in urban legends. From killer clowns to Slender Man, there is no dearth of outstanding tales to tickle the fancy. Urban legends, however, tell us a lot about the ethos of our society.

Contemporary or modern urban legends are widely disseminated narrative accounts of bizarre events that typically relay warnings or cautionary advice. They instill a sense of horror, revulsion, shock, or humor. They have the ability to impact society, and many believe that urban legends contain truth.

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Here are ten facts about urban legends.

1. Urban legends exist because communicators attach risk to them not being retold by recipients, thus exploiting fear.
2. They continually resurface in different iterations, a phenomenon now guaranteed by email and social media.
3. Results of a study published in Frontiers in Psychology indicate that those who promote and endorse anomalistic beliefs, such as urban legends and the paranormal, are more likely to exhibit reality-testing deficits and schizotypal characteristics, such as magical or odd thinking. Of note, reality testing refers to the ability to scrutinize the validity of beliefs in reference to external information.
4. The authors also pointed out that those who ascribe to urban legends let subjective and personal experiences guide their interpretation of the world. “It appears that believers are more likely to engage in experiential processing and base inferences about the world on intuition and self-generated perceptions,” they wrote. “Thinking style undermines critical rational processing, which in turn perpetuates self-validation of beliefs.”
5. Urban legends can be categorized as Social Type, Survival Type, or Combined Type, according to the authors of a study published in the British Journal of Psychology. Social Type urban legends contain social information, and Survival Type contain survival information, while the Combined Type contains elements of both. The investigators found that people were more likely to recall Social and Combined Type legends compared with Survival Type legends. Nevertheless, participants recalled all three types with greater accuracy than control materials.
6. There isn’t a lot of peer-reviewed research on urban legends.
7. Some experts contend that urban legends are actually a type of narrative rumor and refer to them as rumor legends. Although legends tend to be more complex and story-like, as with rumors, they are transmitted with the intention of believability, and they are difficult to verify. Urban legends, however, typically live longer on the Internet than rumors do.
8. Urban legends use irony to relay a message that bulwarks social norms. They warn the audience about the repercussions of breaking social mores.
9. Urban legends often spread negative information about products or brands (e.g., unsanitary ingredients in fast-food items). In this way, they can cause damage to the industry.
10. Although rumors and urban legends change during the course of retelling, with urban legends, these changes are often cosmetic in nature. The setting or time of urban legends changes while the message is retained, which gives urban legends staying power—especially in the time of the Internet.