Urban legends; a testament to cascades
We have all heard them–we have all told them–but do we base our renditions of “tall tales” in actual science?
In 2014, scientists Marco Guerini and Carlo Strapparava published a research paper titled “Credible or Incredible? Dissecting Urban Legends,” which investigates the commonalities between tales in 0rder to answer why some become immensely popular, and others fade from societal memory. Guerini and Strapparava argue that there is a distinct prototype that many of the common legends follow, and that a tale’s adherence to these properties allow the legends to be quantified by “relative stickiness.” Obviously there must be some hook in urban legends that provokes interest, but it is unclear whether they must be true for that interest to be sparked. In fact, the “stickiness” of an urban legend is not necessarily correlated with its credibility, and it is often that only those that could plausibly appear to be true stick. Stories that are obviously false or obviously true are less likely to be spread. Other properties of a good urban legend include being memorable, evoking an emotional connection, and retaining a sense of simplicity. Since these legends can be quantified, and they appear in social networks, it is even conceivable that they can be measured with thresholds and cascades. But now that we are closer to knowing why they spread, can we determine how?
My first assumption when researching this was that urban legends are an example of the strength of the weak ties phenomena. This turned about to be only partially true. Guerini and Strapparava found that similar geographical locations, like major cities, often have different versions of the same tales as compared to rural locations. This is indicative of information traveling over weak ties, yet this does not explain the full picture. In a paper entitled “Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties,” by Damon Centola and Michael Macy of Cornell University, Centola and Macy state that behaviors or complex contagions often need multiple sources of reinforcement and that reliance on weak ties could cause slower diffusion and adaptation (this is compared to simple contagion which only requires contact for adaptation, so urban legends are qualified as complex). This makes sense given that Guerini and Strapparava cite an emotional connection with people as a key component to the stickiness of a legend. Therefore like the creation of urban legends, their spread is slightly more complex and mysterious.
Credible or Incredible? Dissecting Urban Legends
Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties