New Delhi, Oct. 24: Gossip, while as ubiquitous as it is frowned upon, isn’t always bad.
Research findings released today suggest that hearing positive or negative gossip about others helps people improve, promote and protect themselves in their social environments.
The study by a team of psychologists in the Netherlands has found that gossip plays a key role in self-evaluation, helping people assess themselves in comparison with their peers, alert themselves about potential risks and learn ways to improve themselves.
The researchers say their findings might explain why gossip is near-universal, show that women appear more sensitive to gossip than men and challenge conventional thinking that negative gossip is a form of malicious behaviour, showing instead that people who receive gossip use it for self-protection.
“Gossip is not just idle talk or another pleasant way to kill time, but it has a fundamental role in helping people evaluate themselves and formulate expectations about where they are in relation to their social environment,” Elena Martinescu, a Romanian researcher and lead author of the study at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands told The Telegraph. “It is so prevalent in all human societies because it has such an important role in self-evaluation.”
The study was published today in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Gossip has long been a topic of research among psychologists. Studies of human conversations by a team of evolutionary psychologists at the University of Liverpool in the UK in the mid-1990s indicated that people spent nearly two-thirds of their daily conversations in interpersonal assessments.
Researchers suspect the volume of such exchanges has grown over the past decade with the emergence of social media and mobile phone messaging as alternatives to personal chats.
But most studies until now have focused on the functions of gossip on groups of people — not on the individuals. Several studies over the past decade have suggested that gossip helps in conveying norms within a group and identifying those who violate them.
Negative gossip has also been linked to social bonding. Psychologist Jennifer Bosson, now at the University of South Florida, had in a study conducted eight years ago found that sharing negative attitudes about a third person promotes closeness between people.
The study from the Netherlands is the first to explore the emotions that gossip generates in receivers and the first to show that gossip appears to be a relatively safe route used by people to determine their own situation in their social environments.
“Finding out information about the achievements or even miseries of others tells us something about how we are going,” said Grant Michelson, associate dean of research at the Edith Cowan University in Australia, who was not associated with the study, but has analysed the role of gossip in society.
Martinescu and her colleagues exposed groups of volunteers to sets of positive and negative gossip about someone in their own work groups. A typical positive gossip would be: “He’s very creative with ideas, when he tells something, everybody believes him, and that’s a really good thing.” An example of a negative gossip nugget would be: “He didn’t do enough for our group, we were all busy with the upcoming presentation, and he did nothing.”
They found that both positive and negative gossip increased alertness among receivers.
But they observed higher levels of alertness among women who received negative gossip compared to those who received positive gossip. “This is in line with theories that women are more connected with their social environments than men are,” Martinescu said.
Women responded more strongly to the gossip in terms of evoked self-promotion value, self-protection concerns and alertness, the researchers said. The gender differences appear to reflect that women are more relational and interdependent than men and thus more sensitive to social cues.
The study’s findings have also generated concerns about its implications.
“It is worrying that while gossip serves to help protect and reinforce individuals’ own identity, it also highlights the frailties of humanity,” Michelson told The Telegraph. “If people are so fragile that they wish to self-preserve their ego, reputation or self-worth — and gossip helps them in that process — then what are the wider implications here about human existence? How does (society) thrive when individuals are so focused on themselves?”
Martinescu has cautioned that the findings are restricted to workplace gossip and may not apply to other forms of gossip that touch on issues such as moral behaviour, appearance or personality traits.
“It would be too speculative to make any claims about the role of that kind of gossip,” she said. “It is possible that the value receivers find in gossip depends on its content.”