Urban Legends in Your Email
How to Recognize Scary Myths Passed on through the Internet
What are urban legends and why do people fall for them every time? A look at how these stories are spread through the Internet, and how to recognize them.
In your email, you notice a message forwarded from a friend. It's urgent, maybe asking for help in locating 13-year-old Ashley Flores, missing from Philadelphia. Or maybe it's warning you about rat urine found on Coke cans, little girls nearly kidnapped from Sam's Club stores, or telling the story of a little boy who needs money to buy roses for his dying mother.
Frightening and heart rending as these stories might be, there's good news: they are not true. They are examples of urban legends, and they repeatedly hit Internet mailboxes every day, making rounds year after year.
What is an Urban Legend?
Urban legends are stories that may or may not have originated out of true events, but have been exaggerated over time, and are passed on as being real.
These stories are often categorized as either warnings or emotional appeals. An example of a warning would be the story that cautions parents from letting their children play in McDonald's Playland because of hypodermic needles found in the ball pit. An appeal would be the letter urging consumers to avoid buying gas on a specific day, in order to decrease gas prices.
Urban legends have been in existence for ages, but the Internet gives these stories phenomenal access and proliferation through e-mail.
Do People Want to be Afraid?
Although there are some exceptions, the majority of urban legends play on general fears. Just like people enjoy being scared at the movies, there is a thrill that comes from the emotional intensity caused by fear. Psychology Today magazine recounted a study on urban legends, where the professors at Stanford University found that the grosser, or sadder the story, the more it was passed on.
Why People Fall for Urban Legends
When your neighbor down the street sends you an e-mail, you're likely to take it at face value. So when your neighbor forwards you an e-mail that sounds like it was sent from a friend of hers, you extend the same degree of credibility. What's more, you then pass it on to your friends, extending the viral quality of the legend.
Many of the legends play to people's fears, and they react emotionally. After all, who doesn't want to protect loved ones, or help someone in need? These legends are also often so believable, it's hard to imagine they could be false. Children have been kidnapped in the past, so why not from Sam's Club? Foods have been contaminated in the past, so why couldn't there be rat urine on Coke cans?
Another reason people believe the urban legends is that every so often, one is actually true. For every ten false appeals to click on a company's website because that company will then donate to a charitable cause, there is the Hunger Site, which really DOES donate food when you click on their site daily. You're more likely, then to assume other similar stories are also true.
How to Recognize an Urban Legend
Urban legends can be identified by several qualities. The originator of the story is usually described as a friend of a friend (not someone you know directly). Overtime, you may see variations of the same story with slight changes in names and circumstances. They are designed to tug on your emotions, whether fear or empathy, and the telltale sign: they urge you to pass the message on to as many people as you can.
If you want to see if an e-mail message is really an urban legend, look it up at Snopes website, a website dedicated to weeding out urban fact versus urban fiction.
