GOSSIP. Almost all of us do it, most of us are embarrassed about it, and sometimes, to our horror, we get caught.
But not all gossip is bad, and, in fact, gossip can be useful in maintaining social norms and keeping people in line.
Maybe it sounds as if I’m just trying to rationalize the desire to sometimes spread a few juicy bits of information, but recent research looks at the good side of gossip.
First, the definition of gossip is fairly neutral. As Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford who has written widely about gossip, notes, the word gossip originally just meant chatting with one’s “godsibs,” or the peer equivalent of godparents — in other words, people you were particularly close to.
In more modern terms, Timothy Hallett, associate professor in the Indiana University sociology department, defined it as “the unsanctioned evaluative talk about people who aren’t present.”
While the idea that gossip is universal and serves some useful societal needs has been a topic of discussion among academics in the past, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley looks more closely at its social and psychological benefits.
“The normal view of gossip is that it’s always bad, and a lot of gossip is bad,” said Robb Willer, an assistant professor of sociology at Berkeley and a co-author of the study. “But it does serve an important function.”
The study, “The Virtues of Gossip,” published in the May issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that gossip can play the role of protecting others from being exploited by passing on information about bad behavior to warn others.
“If you tell people that this person is a selfish jerk, people learn to avoid the exploitive jerk,” said Matthew Feinberg, a postdoctoral student at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.
Professor Willer said: “We sometimes need to trade information with third parties about people who aren’t around in order to learn from other people’s experiences.”
Of course, the assumption here is that people are always telling the truth and not spreading lies or private stories that they know will cause pain. But Professor Willer said that, while such negative gossip exists, it is useful to look at how other types of gossip can play a valuable role in society.
One experiment in Professor Willer’s study showed how just the threat of gossip could encourage people to be nicer. About 300 participants, recruited from Craigslist, played an economic trust game online using raffle tickets that would be entered for a $50 drawing.
They knew that they could be observed and gossiped about if they did not play fairly, and that spurred virtually all the participants to be more generous, the authors said.
“We’re not saying all gossip is virtuous, but it does serve a purpose from the perspective of the group,” Dr. Feinberg said.
People also feel a tremendous need to gossip — that is, to tell others about someone’s bad behavior behind his or her back — when they perceive that person is acting unfairly.
In a few experiments in the same study, players’ generosity toward each other was measured by how many dollars or points they shared. In the first experiment, 51 volunteers were hooked up to heart rate monitors as they observed the scores of two people playing the game. After a while, it was clear one player was violating the rules and hoarding all the points.
The heart rates of the observers increased as they watched the cheating, and most took advantage of the opportunity to slip a “gossip note” to warn a new player that her opponent was probably not going to play fair.
The heart rates went down once the observers had the opportunity to “tattle.”
Gossip’s role as a means of ensuring that individuals don’t take advantage of a group was also demonstrated by research by two Dutch academics
Bianca Beersma, an associate professor of work and organizational psychology, and Gerben van Kleef, a professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam, told a group of people that they had been randomly chosen to distribute 100 tickets for a lottery with a cash prize. The participants could either generously distribute the tickets to others or selfishly keep many tickets for themselves.
Half the time, the participant was told the choice would be kept private and no one would know. The rest of the time, the decision would be publicized in the group.
In addition, participants were sometimes told that other group members were likely to gossip; other times they were told their actions probably would not be discussed.
Now, people being people, all the players acted selfishly to some degree, keeping more for themselves than they gave to the others. But when they knew their actions were public and the chance of gossip was high, they became quite a bit less selfish, Professors Beersma and Van Kleef found.
Their study, “How the Grapevine Keeps You in Line: Gossip Increases Contributions to the Group,” appeared in the April 12, 2011, issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people do not agree that gossip serves any positive purpose. Beth Weissenberger, co-founder of the Handel Group, an executive coaching company, says the first thing she does when consulting is to ban gossip.
“Gossip is a manipulation,” she said. “It’s a form of being a chicken.”
For example, she said, if a subordinate discovers that her boss is taking full credit for her work, what is she likely to do? “You go underground and tell your colleagues that he’s a jerk,” Ms. Weissenberger said. “Great, now you have four people who agree with you, but you’re still upset. We say you have to have the honest confrontation.”
But others do not see prohibiting gossip as the answer.
“I wouldn’t advocate a no-gossip policy,” Professor Hallett said. “The point is, if you know how gossip works, you can manage and control it.”
He and his co-authors videotaped workplace politics at an urban elementary school. The research initially was not intended to study gossip, but the academics saw that gossip played an important role in the school staff.
What was interesting, Professor Hallett said, was how gossip that occurred in the meetings differed from casual gossip in informal settings. Both were usually negative, yet the gossip in the formal meetings tended to be more subtle and nuanced.
This included using sarcasm or veiled criticism like, “When the old principal was here, things ran so smoothly,” implying, Professor Hallett said, that things were not going so well now.
Knowing this about gossip in formal settings, Professor Hallett said, can allow the leader to address it. “If someone is sarcastic, you can jump in and say, ‘What do you mean?’ ”
The trick, Professor Willer said, is to learn to navigate between helpful and malicious or unreliable gossip.
So it makes sense to me that gossip can serve a purpose in keeping people in line and reinforcing some important societal norms. But I also think we need to be careful not to give ourselves too broad a license. After all, a little gossip goes a long way.