The Upside of Gossip: Social and Psychological Benefits benefits
- Haven’t got anything nice to say? Well, you might want to say it
anyway — especially if you think it’ll help ward off some bad behavior.
- It seems that gossip may be getting an undeserved bad rap,
particularly so-called prosocial gossip, which serves to warn others
about dishonest or untrustworthy people — unlike the catty, idle
chatter that fuels so many office and schoolyard rumors.
- In a small study that looked at the effects of prosocial gossip,
psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that
engaging in behind-the-back talk actually had meaningful social
benefits. It lowered gossipers’ stress, prevented exploitation and
promoted more generous behavior.
- “Gossip can be bad, but we tend to overlook that it can be good as
well,” says social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “A lot of gossip is driven by concern for others and has positive, social effects.”
- In a series of experiments, the researchers asked participants to
observe economic “trust games” in which players’ generosity and trust
were gauged by how many points or dollars they were willing to share
with their opponents. The more points players shared, the greater their
potential individual returns — as long as their opponents shared in
kind.
- In the first experiment, 52 volunteers were hooked up to heart rate
monitors while they looked at the scores of two people who played the
game. The scores made it clear that one player had cheated and hoarded
all the points.
- The participants’ heart rates increased when they noted the
cheating, and they reported feeling frustrated by the unfair outcome.
When given the opportunity, most observers then decided to send a
“gossip note” to the next player, cautioning them not to trust the
cheater — a move that helped lower the participants’ heart rates.
- “We find that those who engage in this form of gossip are generally
driven by sincere desires to help others,” says Willer, noting that it
also eased frustration and made people feel better to do so. “More
generous people are more likely to engage in this form of gossip.”
- Indeed, in a second experiment involving 111 participants,
researchers found that those who indicated stronger tendencies toward
altruism and fairness on a questionnaire were more likely to feel
greater frustration after witnessing cheating in an economic trust
game, more likely to send a gossip note that prevented exploitation of
other players, and more likely to feel happier afterward.
- “The more generous and moral among us are most likely to pass on
rumors about untrustworthy people,” says Willer, “and they report doing
so because they are concerned about the well-being others.”
- A third experiment took the scenario further and required observers
to forfeit some of the pay they had received to participate in the
study if they wanted to send a gossip note. Out of 45 participants, 34
actually chose to give up their own cash just for the chance to warn
other people about a selfish player — even if it didn’t change the
outcome for the selfish person.
- In a fourth and final experiment, the researchers recruited 399
participants from 30 U.S. cities via Craigslist to play several rounds
of the trust game online. The currency of the game was raffle tickets;
players’ tickets would be entered into a drawing for a $50 prize or an
iPod. In this situation — with players given ample reason to collect as
many tickets as possible — the threat of gossip impelled people to play
more generously.
- Participants who were told that observers could send gossip notes
about their behavior to players in the next round behaved more fairly
than those who weren’t threatened with gossip. Interestingly, the
threat of gossip had the greatest impact on those who had scored higher
on selfish, antisocial tendencies on a questionnaire.
- Together, the results of the experiments suggest that gossip can
play an important role in maintaining social order — a purpose that may
have been evolutionarily beneficial. Citing the theories of British
anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the authors write:
[A]s our human ancestors began to live in larger groups,
it became impossible for them to personally monitor the behavior of all
group members… This gave rise to the evolution of linguistic practices,
in particular gossip, as a means for sharing reputational information
about the past behavior of group members. Linguistic practices like
gossip allowed group members to track one another’s reputation as
trustworthy interaction partners, even if they could not personally
observe others’ behavior themselves. With reputational concerns almost
always present, group members were forced to keep selfish motives in
check or risk ostracism.
- The current study looked only at gossip motivated by altruism, not
the mean-spirited rumor-mongering that damages reputations and tends to
breed mistrust. That type of gossip probably doesn’t offer much social
benefit, the authors suggest.
- “Malicious gossip is quite real. Sometimes people gossip as a way to
get back at their enemies or advance themselves. We didn’t study that
form of gossip here, but we suspect that its existence is the reason
that gossip as a whole tends to be viewed negatively,” says Willer.
“What our research shows is that malicious gossip isn’t the only kind,
that a lot of gossip serves a quite important social function.”. ~TIME
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