Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends

The terms ‘gossip’ and ‘urban legend’ are often used interchangeably with ‘rumor’ by both naïve laypersons and professional scholars. Consider our students as naïve laypersons: When asked to evaluate the terms ‘rumor’ and ‘gossip’ along certain dimensions, they rate them almost identically. When asked to ‘think of a rumor’, they frequently report a scandalous tidbit of gossip. Similarly, some of our colleagues - professional scholars of rumor, gossip and/or urban legends - also tend to use these terms interchangeably. For example, participants at a recent interdisciplinary conference on rumor and legend came to no consensus over what distinguishes rumor from legend; scholars of rumor and gossip at a recent conference of social psychologists also argued over whether rumor could be differentiated from gossip. This conceptual fuzziness has been noted for some time (Ojha, 1973). And though much progress has been made in sharpening the construct of rumor (Fine, 1985; Rosnow and Georgoudi, 1985; Rosnow and Kimmel, 2000), ambiguities still remain. Meaningful and important differences do exist, however. In this article we further clarify the concept of rumor and distinguish it from its two cousins, gossip and urban legend. The source of conceptual difficulties has arisen from insufficient attention to the context and function of these genres of informal communication, and conversely, overmuch attention to content.2 We therefore posit a definition of rumor focused upon contexts, functions and contents. We also examine contexts, functions and contents of gossip and urban legends, and explore similarities and differences between these three forms of social discourse. We begin with rumor.