Source credibility: do we really believe everything we’re told?

Newsworthy stories have several common criteria that help news‐gatherers define them. One of these is that the story should be interesting for or of interest to the audience. This means that there are elements of a newsworthy story that are common to gossip, rumours, urban legends and hoaxes that explain why all of these are so attractive to readers and make those stories likely to be published in a profit‐led, entertainment‐driven market. Rumour, hoax and urban legend often offer information where the only criteria that sets them apart from news is whether they can be sourced as being true. But is the most important concern of the news‐gatherer that the story should be true? Many of the stories we are told are “urban legends”. These purport to be true stories but are usually fiction, or are at least only very lightly rooted in the truth, yet people often believe them. Tracking whether people have heard a well‐known urban legend and determining whether they believed it and why, should offer some insight into how discerning people are about the credibility of their information sources. The data collected suggests that people are not particularly sceptical about what they are told and often believe stories that sound fantastic to others. It seems that a “least harm” test is applied when judging whether something is true which means we might pass the story on if this causes the least harm. This leads to an unequal balance of truth‐testing between those telling stories and those receiving them, with both having some expectation that the other will test for truth.