What are urban legends and how they affect people's behavior

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The horror stories that exist in society can lead to really frightening consequences.

Fifty years ago, in one of the articles published in the scientific edition of the Journal of the Folklore Institute, for the first time in the scientific language, the phrase "urban legend" was encountered. Its author was William Edgerton, and the article itself told about the stories circulating among the educated townspeople about how a certain spirit asks for help to a dying person.

Later, urban legends became an independent object of study, and it turned out that they can not only amuse and frighten listeners, but also have a very significant effect on people's behavior.

Folklorists set themselves the goal of elucidating the mechanism of origin and functioning of such legends, as well as explaining why they arise and why human society, it seems, is not able to do without them. Anna Kirzyuk, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a member of the research group "Monitoring of Actual Folklore", tells in more detail about urban legends.

The San Cristobal case

On March 29, 1994, the small alpine town of San Cristobal Verapaz, located four hours from the capital of Guatemala, Guatemala City, was decorated with flowers on the occasion of Holy Week. A procession marched through the city, at the head of which they carried images of the saints. There were many people on the streets - newcomers from nearby villages were added to the seven thousand inhabitants of San Cristobal.

June Weinstock, 51, an environmental activist who came to Guatemala from Alaska, also stayed in the city. In the middle of the day, she went to the town square, where children were playing, to take pictures of them. One of the boys walked away from the others and fled after the procession. Soon his mother missed him - and in a matter of minutes it became clear to the whole city that the boy had been kidnapped by June Weinstock in order to cut out his vital organs, take them out of the country and sell them profitably in the underground market.

The police rushed to cover Weinstock in the courthouse, but the crowd surrounded the building and, after a five-hour siege, rushed inside. Weinstock was found in the judges' closet, where she tried to hide. They dragged her out and began to beat her. She was stoned and beaten with sticks, she was stabbed eight times, both arms were broken, and her head was punctured in several places. The angry mob left Weinstock only after they thought she was dead. And although June Weinstock eventually survived, she spent the rest of her life in a semi-conscious state, under the supervision of doctors and nurses.

What caused such a rapid change in the mood of the Cristobalans, complacent and festively animated half an hour before the hunt for Weinstock? Both in this case, and in the case of several more attacks on foreigners, primarily on Americans, which took place in Guatemala in March and April 1994, it was a question of suspicion of theft and murder of children in order to take their organs to the United States and European countries. … There was no real reason to suspect American tourists of such intentions, but rumors that white gringos were hunting for Guatemalan children began to circulate around the country two or three months before the incident in San Cristobal.

These rumors spread and became overgrown with convincing details. Two weeks before the attack on Weinstock, a journalist for the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre named Mario David García published a long article entitled “Children are often kidnapped to be dismembered into organs”, in which he presented the rumors as fait accompli.

The author of the article accused the "developed countries" of stealing organs from the inhabitants of Latin America, and that for this they used "murder, abduction, dismemberment." David Garcia wrote that “Americans, Europeans and Canadians,” pretending to be tourists, buy and kidnap Guatemalan children. Not a single proof was given in the article, but the text was accompanied by an illustration made in the form of a price tag with a list of organs and the price for each of them. The Prensa Libre issue with this article was displayed in the central square in San Cristobal a few days before the Weinstock massacre.

Attacks on Americans in Guatemala are just one of many examples of how urban legends, unsupported by any evidence, gain credibility in the eyes of a wide range of people and begin to influence their behavior. Where do such legends come from, how do they arise and function? These questions are answered by science, seemingly very far from current news - folklore.

Horror stories

In 1959, the future famous expert on urban legend, American folklorist Ian Branwand, was a graduate student at Indiana University and assisted Professor Richard Dorson in the preparation of the book "American Folklore". In the final chapter on modern folklore, it was, among other things, about the legend "The Dead Cat in the Package" - a funny story about how a thief mistakenly takes a bag with a cat's corpse from a supermarket. While working on the book, Branwand saw an article in the local newspaper where this legend was presented as a true story. Amazed at how active and ubiquitous the plot he had just written about in the book, Branwand cut out the note. This was the beginning of the collection, which later formed the basis of his numerous published collections and encyclopedias of urban legends.

The history of the Branwand collection is quite indicative. Folklorists began to study urban legends after they realized that folklore is not only fairy tales and ballads stored in the memory of elderly villagers, but also texts that live here and now (they can be read in the newspaper, heard on TV news or at a party).

American folklorists began collecting what we now call "urban legends" in the 1940s. It went something like this: a university professor interviewed his students, and then published an article, which was called, for example, "Fictions from students at Indiana University." Such stories from university campuses were most often told about extraordinary events associated with the intervention of supernatural forces in human life.

Such is the famous legend "The Vanishing Hitchhiker", where a random fellow traveler turns out to be a ghost. Some of the "fables from the students of the University of So-and-so" were not mysterious or scary, but were funny stories of an anecdotal type - like, for example, the already mentioned "Dead Cat in a Poke".

Not only funny but also scary stories were told mainly to entertain the audience. Creepy stories about ghosts and maniacs were performed, as a rule, in special situations - when visiting "scary places", at night gatherings by the fire during field trips, during the exchange of stories before going to bed in a summer camp - which made the fear caused by them rather conditional.

A common feature of urban legend is the so-called "attitude towards reliability". This means that the narrator of the legend seeks to convince the listeners of the reality of the events described.

In a newspaper article with which Jan Branwand began his collection, the plot of the legend was presented as a real incident that happened to a friend of the author. But in reality, for different types of urban legends, the question of reliability has different meanings.

Stories like The Disappearing Hitchhiker were told as real cases. However, the answer to the question of whether someone's accidental travel companion really turned out to be a ghost does not in any way affect the real behavior of those who tell and listen to this story. Just like the story of the theft of a bag with a dead cat, it does not contain any recommendations about behavior in real life. Listeners of such stories can feel goosebumps from contact with the otherworldly, they can laugh at an unlucky thief, but they will not stop giving hitchhikers or stealing bags in supermarkets, if they were doing this before meeting the legend.

Real threat

In the 1970s, folklorists began to study stories of a different type, not funny and completely devoid of a supernatural component, but reporting about a certain danger that threatens us in real life.

First of all, these are "contamination food stories" familiar to many of us, telling, for example, about a visitor to a MacDonald`s restaurant (or KFC, or Burger King) who finds a rat, worm or other inedible and unpleasant object in your lunchbox.

In addition to stories about poisoned food, many other "consumer legends" (mercantile legends) come to the attention of folklorists, in particular Cokelore - numerous stories about the dangerous and miraculous properties of cola, which is supposedly capable of dissolving coins, provoking deadly diseases, causing drug addiction and serve as home contraception. In the 1980s and 1990s, this set was complemented by legends about "HIV terrorists" who leave infected needles in public places, organ theft legends, and many others.

All these stories also began to be called "urban legends". However, there is one important thing that sets them apart from stories like The Disappearing Hitchhiker and Dead Pig in a Poke.

While the “credibility” of stories about ghosts and hapless thieves does not oblige listeners to anything, stories about poisoned food and HIV-infected needles induce the audience to commit or refuse to perform certain actions. Their goal is not to entertain, but to communicate a real threat.

That is why it is very important for the distributors of this type of legend to prove its authenticity. They make a lot of effort to convince us of the reality of the threat. When a reference to the experience of a “friend of my friend”, classic for “entertaining” legends, is not enough, then they refer to “messages from the Ministry of Internal Affairs” and conclusions of scientific institutes, and in extreme cases they create pseudo-documents allegedly emanating from the authorities.

This is exactly what an official from the administration of one city near Moscow, Viktor Grishchenko, did in October 2017. Grishchenko was so worried about Internet messages about "drug chewing gum" allegedly distributed to children by anonymous drug dealers that he printed this information on an official letterhead, provided all the proper seals and referred to a letter from the "Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs". Likewise, an unknown distributor of the story of Costa Rican killer bananas, allegedly containing deadly parasites, put the text of this legend on the letterhead of the University of Ottawa and signed it with a medical faculty researcher.

The "credibility" of legends of the second type has very real, sometimes very serious consequences.

After hearing the story of an elderly lady who decided to dry the cat in the microwave, we will just laugh, and our reaction will be the same regardless of whether we believe this story to be reliable or not. If we trust a journalist who publishes an article about villains who kill “our children” through “death groups”, we will surely feel the need to do something: restrict our child's access to social networks, prohibit teenagers from using the Internet at the legislative level, find and plant villains and the like.

There are a lot of examples when the “legend about a real threat” forced people to do or, conversely, not do something. The drop in KFC sales due to tales of a rat found in a lunchbox is another relatively harmless version of the influence of folklore on life. The story of June Weinstock suggests that under the influence of urban legends, people are sometimes ready to kill.

It was the study of "legends about a real threat" that influenced the real behavior of people that led to the emergence of the theory of ostensia - the influence of a folk story on the real behavior of people. The importance of this theory is not limited to the framework of folklore.

Linda Dagh, Andrew Vashoni and Bill Ellis, who proposed the concept of ostensia in the 1980s, gave a name to a phenomenon that has long been known not only to folklorists, but also to historians studying various cases of mass panic caused by stories about the atrocities of "witches", Jews or heretics. Ostensia theorists have identified several forms of influence of folklore stories on reality. The most powerful of them, ostention itself, we observe when someone embodies the plot of a legend or begins to fight those sources of danger that the legend points to.

It is the ostensia itself that is behind the modern Russian news with the headline "A teenage girl was convicted of persuading minors to commit suicide": most likely, the convict decided to embody the legend of the "death groups" and become the "curator" of the game "Blue Whale", about which this legend told … A similar form of ostensia is represented by the attempts of some adolescents to look for imaginary "curators" and fight them on their own.

As we can see, the concepts developed by American folklorists perfectly describe our Russian cases. The point is that legends about "real" threats are arranged in a very similar way - even if they appear and "live" in very different conditions. Because they are often based on beliefs common to many cultures, such as the danger of aliens or new technologies, such stories easily transcend ethnic, political and social boundaries.

Legends of the "entertaining" type are not characterized by such ease of movement: the "Disappearing Hitchhiker", widespread throughout the world, is the exception rather than the rule. We will not find domestic counterparts for most "entertaining" American legends, but we can easily find them for stories about "poisoned food". For example, the story of a rat tail, which a consumer finds in food, circulated in the 1980s both in the USA and in the USSR, only in the American version the tail was in a hamburger, and in the Soviet version it was in sausage.

Looking for an illusion

The ability of "threatening" legends to influence the real behavior of people led not only to the emergence of the theory of ostensia, but also to the fact that the perspective of studying urban legend has changed. While folklorists were engaged in "entertaining" subjects, a typical work on an urban legend looked like this: the researcher listed the plot options he collected, carefully compared them with each other, and reported where and when these options were recorded. The questions he asked himself related to the geographical origin, structure and existence of the plot. After a short period of studying the "real danger" stories, the research questions changed. The key question was why this or that legend appears and becomes popular.

The very idea of the need to answer the question about the raison d`être of the folklore text belonged to Alan Dandes, who analyzed mainly "entertaining" legends, as well as anecdotes and children's counting rhymes. However, his idea did not become mainstream until scientists began to regularly pursue legends of "real danger."

The actions of people who perceive such stories as authentic often resembled bouts of collective insanity that needed to be explained somehow.

Perhaps that is why it has become important for researchers to understand why these stories are believed.

In its most general form, the answer to this question was that the legends about the "real threat" perform some important functions: for some reason people need to believe in such stories and disseminate them. What for? Some researchers come to the conclusion that the legend reflects the fears and other uncomfortable emotions of the group, others - that the legend gives the group a symbolic solution to its problems.

In the first case, the urban legend is seen as "the exponent of the inexpressible." It is in this that researchers Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi see the purpose of stories about unknown villains who allegedly give poisoned treats to children on Halloween. Such stories circulated massively in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s: in October and November of each year, newspapers were filled with eerie reports of children receiving candy with poison or razor inside, frightened parents forbade children to participate in the traditional ritual of trick- or-treating, and in Northern California, things got to the point where bags of treats were X-rayed.

When asked about the reasons for society's susceptibility to this legend, Best and Horiuchi answer as follows. The legend of Halloween poisoning, they say, was especially widespread at a time when America was going through an unpopular war, student riots and demonstrations were taking place in the country, Americans were faced with new youth subcultures and the problem of drug addiction.

At the same time, there was a destruction of the traditional for "one-story America" of neighboring communities. Vague anxiety for children who might die in war, become victims of crime or drug addicts combined with a sense of loss of trust in people they know well, and all this found expression in a simple and understandable narrative about anonymous villains poisoning children's treats on Halloween. This urban legend, according to Best and Horiuchi, articulated social tension: by pointing to a fictitious threat posed by anonymous sadists, it helped society express anxiety that was previously obscure and undifferentiated.

In the second case, the researcher believes that the legend not only expresses the group's poorly expressed emotions, but also fights against them, becoming something of a "symbolic pill" against collective anxiety. In this vein, Diana Goldstein interprets the legends about HIV-infected needles, which supposedly await unsuspecting people in the armchairs of cinemas, in nightclubs and in telephone booths. This plot caused several waves of panic in Canada and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s: people were afraid to go to the movies and nightclubs, and some, going to the cinema, wore thicker clothes to avoid the injection.

Goldstein notes that in all versions of the legend, infection occurs in public space, and an anonymous stranger acts as the villain. Therefore, she believes, this legend should be viewed as a "resistant response" (resistant response) to modern medicine, which claims that the source of HIV infection can be a constant partner.

The thought that you can get infected in your own bedroom from a loved one causes severe psychological discomfort. This is why a story emerges that asserts something exactly the opposite (that the danger comes from public places and anonymous outsiders). Thus, by portraying reality as more comfortable than it really is, the legend allows its carriers to indulge in illusions.

In both cases, it is easy to see that the plot fulfills a therapeutic function.

It turns out that in certain situations society simply cannot but spread legends - just as a psychosomatic patient cannot do without a symptom (since the symptom "speaks" for him), and just as none of us can do without dreams, where our desires, unrealizable in reality, are realized. The urban legend, as ridiculous as it may seem, is in fact a special language that allows us to talk about our problems and sometimes to solve them symbolically.