Stories Told as True

01Legend and Rumor as Negotiations of Cultural Ideology

Legend, from the perspective of contemporary folkloristics, is best understood as a flexible narrative genre performed as credible or true. Its plausibility comes from familiar places, socially recognizable actors, and its fit with assumptions already available in a community. The genre therefore has a reciprocal relation to belief: existing beliefs make a legend believable, while repeated legends can support and sharpen those beliefs (Tangherlini 1990, 378–81). Rumor is closely related. Rather than constituting an entirely separate genre, narrative rumor can be understood as a hyperactive transmission state of legend: an account circulates rapidly because ambiguity and collective concern create a demand for interpretation (Allport and Postman 1947; Shibutani 1966; Tangherlini 1990, 374–75). It often lacks a clear resolution, and rather asks its audience, “what should we do about this threatening or disruptive situation?”

A generative model of legend makes this more precise. Within a domain such as vaccination, immigration, or electoral politics, tellers draw from a limited pool of actors and relations. They identify insiders and outsiders, specify threats, recount results, and endorse or reject responses. Each performance activates part of a larger narrative framework and can help orient a decision: vaccinate or refuse, include or exclude, wait or act. Decisions in stories generate outcomes such as an illness attributed to a vaccine, a crime to an immigrant, or an electoral defeat to fraud; these in turn may become new narrative evidence. Over time, this process of repeated storytelling with some degree of variation stabilizes on an underlying narrative framework (Tangherlini 2018). Comments, counter-stories, and retellings reinforce some relations while others disappear. Ultimately, the narrative framework constrains what counts as a recognizable story and sensible choice, while narrated outcomes can confirm or modify it (Tangherlini 2018). Storytelling is therefore an arena in which participants make their group ideology concrete, act through it, narrate the perceived consequences, and negotiate what should follow.

Existing beliefs make a legend believable, while repeated legends can support and sharpen those beliefs.

Emotion is central to this process. Legends organize diffuse pressures into scenes of danger, violation, rescue, or vindication, giving form to collectively experienced anxiety, fear, and desire (Crane 1977; Tangherlini 1990, 381). Beliefs also interact with knowledge, social norms, distrust, and emotion. Fear can facilitate antagonistic beliefs and out-group prejudice, while institutional distrust can prepare people to accept related claims (Hébert-Dufresne et al. 2025; Pertwee, Simas, and Larson 2022). Emotion can in this manner turn interpretation into a readiness for action.

02Vaccination: Recasting Refusal as Protection

Vaccination hesitancy and the circulation of stories on parenting blogs help illustrate this phenomenon with unusual clarity. An analysis of parenting sites found a stable vaccine-exemption framework populated by parents, children, medical professionals, schools, government, religious institutions, vaccines, adverse effects, and exemptions (Tangherlini et al. 2016). In the aggregate storytelling, vaccines were positioned as threats to children, while parents protected their children by rejecting vaccination or securing exemptions. Vaccine-preventable diseases appeared in the discourse but had few strong relations to the other actors. The protective function of vaccination was therefore less narratively salient than the alleged injuries associated with vaccination (Tangherlini et al. 2016; Tangherlini 2018, 8–10). Within this narrative framework, a reported adverse event could, for example, shape a refusal decision; that refusal and its subsequent outcome might then become another account of successful protection or, if illness followed, material for a counter-story.

In 2016, a two-site study of parenting blogs analyzed 1.99 million posts and found a persistent exemption narrative despite substantial turnover in forum membership. In 2017, a complementary analysis of 299,778 mothering.com posts examined the interaction and consensus structure of one of those communities in greater detail. Twenty-seven percent of the discussions there concerned decisions and research, thirteen percent vaccine dangers, and eleven percent exemptions. The forum was broadly consensus-driven and predominantly antivaccination. Most strikingly, the researchers identified a participant who entered as pro-vaccine but later decided not to vaccinate after receiving overwhelmingly negative responses. While there was no direct proof that the replies caused her decision, it nevertheless shows a decision taking shape inside a community where personal stories, social agreement, and distrust made refusal intelligible as responsible parenting (Bandari et al. 2017).

Related experimental evidence strengthens the plausibility of storytelling influence. Betsch and colleagues found that five to ten minutes of exposure to vaccine-critical websites increased perceived vaccination risk and reduced vaccination intentions (Betsch et al. 2010), suggesting that a narrative and informational environment can change the judgments that precede action. Andrea Kitta's historical and folkloristic work likewise demonstrates that vaccine anxiety is sustained through recurring legends, rumors, risk perceptions, and distrust rather than through isolated factual propositions (Kitta 2012). Taken together, these studies suggest an interacting process: anecdotes embody a narrative framework; fear and protective concern give it rhetorical weight; community responses make refusal appear normative; and exemptions supply a practicable strategy for dealing with the vaccine-as-threat. The experience that follows, whether an uneventful nonvaccination, a suspected adverse reaction, or a child suffering a vaccine-preventable illness, does not enter collective understanding automatically, but instead is interpreted through competing frameworks. When added to the conversation, it then becomes part of the narrative environment confronting the next parent.

03Ethnocentric Stories, Elections, and Collective Action

The same process can organize political judgment. In a comparative study of historical and contemporary Danish legends, Tangherlini showed how Danish legends preserved durable structures of threat while changing the identity of the threatening actor (Tangherlini 1995). In older rural traditions, trolls, elves, witches, and robbers endangered food, fertility, bodily safety, and the integrity of the farm. In contemporary variants, immigrants and ethnic minorities were assigned analogous roles: they contaminated food, stole and ate people's pets, threatened women, or violated the boundary between insider and outsider. The legends did not neutrally report the behavior of immigrants and ethnic outsiders. Instead, they reassigned inherited attributes of a nonhuman Other to actual minority groups, thereby codifying ethnocentric values and making marginalization appear to follow from communal self-protection (Tangherlini 1995).

The legends did not neutrally report the behavior of immigrants and ethnic outsiders.

This mechanism matters for electoral politics as well. For instance, the unfounded accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents' pets played an outsize role in the recent presidential debates, intended to influence how people would vote, since voting itself can be understood as a judgment in part about threats, group boundaries, and legitimate remedies. Analysis of 1.8 million tweets surrounding the 2017 French presidential election found a discourse arena structured by “Islamization,” the European Union, nationalization, freedom, and the business climate. Local discussions connected Muslims, revolution, patriotism, and “Le Penism” (Abello, Tangherlini, and Zhang 2024). While these findings do not show that exposure to a particular anti-immigrant story caused an individual to vote for Marine Le Pen, they do reveal the narrative environment in which such a vote could be experienced as defending a threatened national community. Read alongside the earlier study, the electoral discourse appears not as an arbitrary list of issues but as a contemporary activation of a resilient insider–outsider framework.

Research on the Parler forum in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021 insurrection reinforces this conclusion, and shows how such narrative frameworks can progress from diagnosis of a threat to developing a strategy for dealing with that threat. After the 2020 U.S. election, people posting on Parler portrayed patriots and a divinely favored America as threatened by Democrats, “globalists,” the “deep state,” and a fraudulent electoral system. These discussions did far more than offer a forum for people to express their anger. Instead, participants negotiated ways to “fight back,” and the narrative field increasingly linked a stolen-election story to plans for action on January 6 (Miller et al. 2025). Earlier work on Pizzagate similarly reconstructed how stories assembled a fictitious conspiracy from familiar political actors and alleged hidden relations; one believer eventually entered the named pizzeria armed with a rifle (Tangherlini et al. 2020).

04Conclusion

Stories play a profound role in developing community, and negotiating the bounds of a community's cultural ideology — those beliefs, norms and values that allow people to think, “yes, they are one of us.” Through the circulation of stories on and across these social networks, people learn who belongs, what counts as evidence, which dangers deserve fear or anger, and which practices express loyalty, care, or self-defense, particularly since these social networks are usually marked by homophily and trust.

By joining ideology to concrete actors and emotionally charged outcomes, stories can help people converge on not only what they perceive of as threatening or disruptive, but also on what the appropriate strategies are for dealing with those threats. If a story suggests a particular strategy for dealing with a perceived threat — for instance, to vaccinate against the threat of measles — but the outcome of the vaccination is harm to the child, then that strategy will contribute to the narrative rejection of vaccination as a strategy for protecting children.

Understanding group decision-making requires more than measuring attitudes or tracking isolated pieces of misinformation. It requires a deep understanding of the stories circulating in a community: who are the actants, who is inside, who is outside, what are the threats and what is threatened. And, of course, what are the strategies for dealing with those threats. It is also imperative to consider the emotions those stories elicit. A story that elicits a strong emotional response is likely one that will both persist in a group's storytelling and guide future action. Whether the practice at issue is refusing a vaccine, supporting an exclusionary political program, or joining collective action, decisions become intelligible within communities through stories, and their outcomes become intelligible through further storytelling.

A story that elicits a strong emotional response is likely one that will both persist in a group's storytelling and guide future action.

05References

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2. Allport, Gordon W., and Leo Postman. 1947. The Psychology of Rumor. New York: Henry Holt.
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12. Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1995. “From Trolls to Turks: Continuity and Change in Danish Legend Tradition.” Scandinavian Studies 67 (1): 32–62.
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