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Category: Patterns
Date: 03 Oct 2006 08:18pm
Title: Credibility of retold stories

Credibility and degrees of separation of story-teller and story-hearer

This pattern occurred to me when reading 1 Nephi 1:3, "And I know that the record which I make is true; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge."

I think Nephi is trying to establish the credibility of his story. He is relating thing he saw with his own eyes, and he is writing it personally, not dictating it for another to write down.

When you hear a story, you can judge the credibility by the number of people separating the original teller from the hearer (yourself), or the number of people the story went through before it got to you.

• 0th degree of separation (0 people) is telling yourself a story 

• 1st degree of separation: it happened to the teller, therefore it is highly credible, as long as you trust him.
  

• Did it happen to the one who told the teller? That is 2 people (2nd degree of separation). It is credible, but interpreted by the one in the middle.
  

• It happened to someone who told my friend who told me: 3rd degree of separation.
  

• heard it from a friend who heard...? This is greater than the 3rd degree of separation, but is almost indistiguishable from 3rd degree.

So 3rd degree (3 people) is no more credible than Nth degree (an unknown number of retellings) because they are difficult to tell apart.

People who research Urban Legends have to try to trace a story back through lots and lots of retellings, and often come up with surprising results of what the original story really was.