I SAW A MONKEY PLAYING MOZART

On the roots of urban legends

“A lie can travel halfway around the world
while the truth is putting on its shoes”
Mark Twain

In an experiment conducted years ago at the University of Chicago, five monkeys were placed in a cage. A banana was suspended from the center of the cage and beneath it the researchers positioned a ladder. Not long went by before one of the monkeys began climbing in the direction of the banana. The moment its foot touched the first step, the other monkeys in the cage were sprayed with ice water. After a while another monkey tried his luck and again the researchers sprayed cold water on its cage mates, and the same happened several more times. The cold-water hose was eventually removed from the cage, but whenever one of the monkeys headed for the ladder, the other monkeys prevented it from doing so, sometimes employing unrestrained violence. At this point, the researchers took one of the monkeys out of the cage and replaced it with another monkey. The new monkey immediately spotted the banana and tried to grab it, but as soon as it set foot on the first step it was attacked by the rest of the monkeys, which wanted to prevent its carrying on. After another attempt this monkey too learned that if it valued its physical integrity, it had best give up the banana. Next, another monkey was replaced by a fresh monkey and the process repeated itself—the monkey that had recently joined the group took part in the assault on the new monkey as it tried its luck at securing the banana, and even displayed a marked enthusiasm that is ordinarily reserved for those who have just converted their faith or for young warriors bent on impressing the veterans in the combat unit they joined lately. And then a third monkey was substituted. Its replacement made its way to the ladder and was immediately punished savagely by all the rest. Two of those that were beating it, the newcomers, had no idea whatsoever why they had been prevented from climbing the ladder and even less so why they were taking part in assaulting the new monkey.

After the fourth monkey and fifth monkey from the original group of monkeys were replaced, there remained no monkeys in the cage that had physically experienced the cold-water spray. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys left in the cage tried to climb the steps en route to the banana.

I heard this catchy story a while back from a ski instructor who was attempting to persuade me that, like the monkeys, I had adopted several harmful skiing habits whose source I had never bothered to examine. At this point I was supposed to have an epiphany and adopt a new skiing technique better suited to the modern equipment that had grown in sophistication since I was introduced, many years ago, to this invigorating sport. I preferred to go surfing instead, to track down online the research roots of that story. A search of the Web quickly brought the story and its educational lessons to the surface. Certain versions preferred a ladder to a staircase and others made do with four monkeys. In one version, in which human words were placed in the monkeys’ mouths, the battered monkey asks the other monkeys: “But why?” and they reply in unison: “Because we have always done it that way here.”

The main problem with the study described above is that it never took place. The behavior of rhesus monkeys was in fact studied in 1967 by a Canadian researcher, who hypothesized that a naïve monkey placed in a cage with other monkeys that had adapted to certain conditioning might adopt that conditioning, but that, more or less, was it. Welcome to the department of studies that turned into urban legends. I have told my readers this story more than once, but that is precisely how urban legends take on a life of their own—when they are repeated and recounted time and again. However, this begs the question: what is it about an urban legend that makes it such catchy information, when so many more important pieces of information cannot even cross the threshold of our consciousness?

Urban legends frequently carry a moral lesson, such as in the story of the caged monkeys, and they are first and foremost stories—they have a setting, protagonists, a plot that comes to a climax, and a punch line that unravels the narrative thicket. They help people to amuse themselves and instill in others social values and norms, and a few of them reflect fears and concerns shared by many. Urban legends take hold in our hearts because they provide illuminating social insights in cultural or economic contexts that preoccupy us all. It is hard to trace their sources, and the roots of some are planted in the past, but urban legends like the monkey story, which purportedly originated in a scientific study, have an uncharacteristic advantage over other legends: we can chart their evolution because their source is defined and known.

One such famous legend claims that listening to classical music (and particularly works by Mozart) enhances babies’ intelligence. This belief originated in a study published by the journal Nature in 1993, which found that college students who listened to a Mozart sonata for ten minutes improved their performance on a spatial intelligence test by eight to ten IQ points. The findings, which were dubbed the “Mozart effect,” sparked a wave of subsequent studies that tried to replicate the results of the original study but yielded mixed results at best. A comprehensive comparative analysis that considered 16 different studies on the subject concluded that the overall effect is negligible. But even though the Mozart effect failed to meet scientific standards, it enjoyed widespread popularity with the public at large. The study was cited in countless public debates that dealt with education in general and with developing the skills of infants in particular (the participants of the original research, don’t forget, were college students). At the height of the craze, the state of Georgia passed a bill that promised to hand out a classical music CD to the mothers of newborns. The state of Florida, for its part, passed a bill requiring state-funded daycare facilities to play classical music daily. Stores displayed appropriate books and CDs, and public awareness of the phenomenon reached a rate of 80%. The phenomenon spread overseas as well and became one of the most successful urban legends in the world.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to trace most urban legends with the same ease that legends based, ostensibly, on scientific research afford. The flagship website for aficionados of urban legends is snopes.com and it crowns itself the Web’s most comprehensive source of reference for such legends, folktales, myths, rumors and misleading information. You can surf the site by categories (there are no fewer than 43) or jump straight to the list of the 25 hottest stories. In the crime category, for example, you can find the story about a cigar smoker who took out fire insurance on several hundred cigars. After he had enjoyed smoking all of them, he filed a claim with the insurance company on the grounds that the cigars had gone up in smoke. The insurance company refused to pay and the man sued it. The judge ordered the company to compensate the insuree, but once he received the money the company promptly sought his arrest for arson. According to snopes.com, the story came into being in the mid-1960s and was found to be groundless.

The website’s diligent editors regale surfers with hundreds of legends of this sort, analyze their origins, and pronounce them true, bogus, or in many cases stories that contain a grain of truth. One such story is about a driver from California who got a speeding ticket in the mail along with the picture that was taken by the camera he sped past, and an order to pay a $40 fine (this was in the 1960s). The furious driver returned the letter together with a photograph of two $20 bills, the requested fine. A week later, he received a reply from the police and when he opened the letter he found a photograph of a pair of handcuffs.The website TopTenz.net ranks, among other things, the ten myths and urban legends that earned the most fans. Starting with the claim that if you place a tooth in a glass of Coke at night it will be consumed by the morning, through the horror stories about alligators released into the city sewer system, and ending with the story that took the distinguished first place, the legend about the kidney robbery, which was even enshrined in the movies. The story probably got its start in 1997, when a letter began to circulate on the Web warning of a new crime. Most versions tell of a traveling businessman who finds himself at a bar and accepts an offer from a stranger, who strikes up a conversation with him, to join him for a drink. Soon enough the traveling salesman’s consciousness is impaired and he wakes up in an unfamiliar hotel room, usually inside an ice-filled bathtub. A note left nearby suggests that he telephone the emergency services, and when they arrive it turns out he is the victim of a network of swindlers that drugged and stole a kidney from his body to sell on the black market. The story is made up, and an American health organization that asked that anyone who had been hurt by the theft of a kidney contact it did not receive a single call.

In 1981, Jan Harold Brunvand’s book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings was published, and spurred broad public awareness of the urban legends phenomenon. Brunvand pointed out in his book that urban legends and folktales are not unique to primitive societies, and that analyzing them can teach us a great deal about the culture of their creators. One of the traits of urban legends is an absence of specific details of place, time, the names of those involved and similar identifying information. Many preference themes of horror, crime, poisoned food or other situations liable to affect many people. According to Brunvand, anyone who feels threatened by the story will rush to warn those he cares about, and thus the story takes on wings that ensure its dissemination.

Like myths, urban legends fall on ready ears because they reinforce worldviews previously held by the public and help to explain events that seem complex to understand. The researchers realize also that urban legends help us cope with our repressed fears. A story about a dog that was smuggled from another country and turned out to be an overdeveloped rat reflects fear of illegal immigrants; a story about a teenage boy who accidentally ingested a snake egg reflects fear of substances that cause stomach infections; and a story about the bride who called off her wedding after she found out that her intended groom had slept with her sister a few days before the ceremony reflects fear of infidelity. Through stories like these we are supposed to acquire a certain measure of control over our fears and to warn others against them.

Sundry social psychology theories try to explain the way ideas are distributed and the reason they manage to gain a hold on people’s hearts. Most of these theories suppose that distributing ideas fulfills a social function in the sense that they meet a genuine need of individuals or a society. Putting the findings of a scientific study in layman’s terms, for example, helps the general population cope with the threat inherent in such studies for those not versed in reading their results. Rumors, for their part, spread through the population in reaction to uncertainty and anxiety, and one study even located a correlation in test subjects between a tendency toward anxiety and a tendency to spread rumors. Conspiracy stories—kin to rumors—are based on the notion that behind a major social, political or economic event lurks a secret plan unknown to the public. This plan is enacted by devious elements that are powerful and influential to attain a diabolical objective. These stories as well explain in their own way a complex world and greatly simplify it by dividing it into forces of dark and light.

Particularly intriguing is the theory that ascribes evolutionary roots to this phenomenon. In 1976, the famous evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins published his book The Selfish Gene. In it he introduced for the first time the possibility that cultural baggage in general, and ideas in particular, are spread, like genes or viruses, by means of information units he termed “memes.” The invention of the wheel, wedding rings or a piece of juicy gossip—all are units of cultural information that are spread in this way. For a meme to spread it needs several features that lend it “stickiness.” A stale joke, for instance, has no stickiness and it dies a miserable death on the lips of the first teller. Sticky ideas are simply put, they are surprising, concrete, credible, storylike and emotional. That distinction is offered by Chip and Dan Heath in a book they published in 2007 entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

A study that Chip Heath and colleagues conducted and published in 2001 focused on the possibility that the diffusion of memes involves a process of selection that is influenced primarily by their ability to evoke a strong emotional response, preferably one that is shared by many. The stronger the emotional response a meme elicits, the greater its chance of being remembered, of being passed on, and of winning the competition against the other memes. Urban legends are memes, and Heath and his colleagues tried to test their theory with their help. They used the story about a man who drank a soft drink from a bottle at the bottom of which he spotted a dead mouse, and created three versions of the story that differed from each other only in the level of repulsion they prompted. In the “light” repulsion version the man noticed the little corpse before he brought the bottle to his lips, whereas in the “heavy” version, well, you get the picture. When the researchers tried to establish which ideas manage to get through more, they found that subjects had a greater tendency to pass on the version of the story that arouses the most disgust. A complementary study they conducted compared assorted websites devoted to urban legends and tallied the relative frequency of the various motifs that appear in the legends posted there. Here too it turned out that the memes that survive are not necessarily those that adhere to the truth, but rather those that inspire a powerful emotional response. Repulsion is a leading motif in these stories, as reflected in a popular urban legend from Japan.

Aka Manto (Japanese for “red cape”) is a spirit that prefers to manifest in restrooms. Generally in the last toilet stall of the women’s bathroom. When the hapless victim sits down on the toilet, she hears a mysterious voice ask her whether she prefers red or blue paper. If she says red paper, she will be murdered in bloody violence (red). If she asks for the blue, she will be strangled to death (and her face will turn blue). Any other color she asks for will immediately call forth hands to drag her off to the flames of hell. The only way to save herself is not to ask for anything. I wondered whether this might not be, in the manner of urban legends, an allegory warning us against the consumer culture that consumes us in countless ways, and the only way to survive is not to ask anything for ourselves.