Retelling urban legends

JEAN E. FOX TREE and MARY SUSAN WELDON
University of California, Santa Cruz

We explored factors influencing the retelling of urban legends. As predicted by prior work, people retold truthful and scary stories. But people also retold wellknown 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.