Summary: While gossiping generally has negative connotations, a new study says gossiping can be a rich and multifaceted form of communication. Gossip can help to build social connections and improve indirect understanding about the world.
Source: Dartmouth College
Gossip is often considered socially taboo and dismissed for its negative tone, but a Dartmouth study illustrates some of its merits. Gossip facilitates social connection and enables learning about the world indirectly through other people’s experiences.
Gossip is not necessarily spreading rumors or saying bad things about other people but can include small talk in-person or online, such as having a private chat during a Zoom meeting. Prior research has found that approximately 14% of people’s daily conversations are gossip, and primarily neutral in tone.
“Gossip is a complex form of communication that is often misunderstood,” says Eshin Jolly, a post-doctoral researcher in the Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory (COSAN) who co-authored the study with Luke Chang, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the COSAN Lab at Dartmouth.
“It can be a means of social and substantive connection beyond its typical negative connotation,” adds Jolly.
Jolly and Chang were curious why people in their personal and professional lives spend so much time exchanging information about themselves and other people, and sought to determine why people gossip and what function it serves.
They created a game online to examine the role of gossip and how it manifests as information becomes more uncertain within the game. Participants played 10 rounds of the game together in six-person groups.
In each round, players were given $10 and could choose to keep the money or invest any portion of it into a group fund that was multiplied by 1.5x and divided equally among the players.
The game creates an inherent tension between selfish freeriding and cooperative behavior, and is considered what researchers refer to as a public goods game.
In some conditions, information was restricted so that participants could only observe the behavior of a few other players in their group.
“Our inspiration was creating a life-like scenario, in which you’re a member of a community and affected by the actions of all other community members, but most of whom you rarely observe and engage with directly,” Jolly explained.
In some games, players could privately chat with another player in the group. This allowed players to relay information about other players’ behavior to their partner, such as whether another player was freeriding. Afterwards, players reported their willingness to play with each player again.
Published in Current Biology, their findings demonstrate how gossip is a “rich, multifaceted communication” with several social functions.
Different types of gossip emerged depending on the amount of information available. Spontaneous conversations about others occurred more frequently during games when players could only observe the behavior of a few of their group members. When players could directly observe all of their group members, they tended to chit-chat and discuss a wider array of topics.
Participants relied on second-hand information from their partners to stay informed about other peoples’ behavior that they could not see, illustrating how gossip enables individuals to learn from the experiences of others when direct observation is not feasible.
The findings also showed that participants who chatted with each other felt the most connected with each other at the end of the game and even shared similar impressions of the other players in their group.
Chang explains that, “By exchanging information with others, gossip is a way of forming relationships. It involves trust and facilitates a social bond that is reinforced as further communication takes place.”
In a typical public goods game, players contribute less over time and an unraveling effect occurs that propagates through a network of people. However, in this study, cooperation declined less over time when players could privately communicate. Communication increased collective cooperation.
The researchers explain that gossip should not be relegated to just “baseless trash talk”. According to the paper, the team’s findings on the role of gossip are consistent with creating a “shared reality” in which friends and colleagues often find common bonds, establish alliances, exchange personal information, and discuss the behavior of others to establish a consensus of socially acceptable behavior.
“Gossip can be useful because it helps people learn through the experiences of others, while enabling them to become closer to each other in the process,” says Jolly.
About this social neuroscience research news
Source: Dartmouth College
Contact: Amy D. Olson – Dartmouth College
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Gossip drives vicarious learning and facilitates social connection” by Eshin Jolly and Luke J. Chang. Current Biology
Abstract
Gossip drives vicarious learning and facilitates social connection
Highlights
- •Gossip is a multi-faceted behavior that reflects multiple social functions
- •Gossip facilitates learning from others when direct observation is not possible
- •Gossip builds social connections and aligns social impressions and behavior
- •Gossip increases cooperative group behavior in public goods games
Summary
Complex language and communication is one of the unique hallmarks that distinguishes humans from most other animals. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of our communication consists of social topics involving self-disclosure and discussions about others, broadly construed as gossip. Yet the precise social function of gossip remains poorly understood as research has been heavily influenced by folk intuitions narrowly casting gossip as baseless trash talk.
Using a novel empirical paradigm that involves real interactions between a large sample of participants, we provide evidence that gossip is a rich, multifaceted construct, that plays a critical role in vicarious learning and social bonding.
We demonstrate how the visibility or lack thereof of others’ behavior shifts conversational content between self-disclosure and discussions about others. Social information acquired through gossip aids in vicarious learning, directly influencing future behavior and impression formation.
At the same time, conversation partners come to influence each other, form more similar impressions, and build robust social bonds. Consistent with prior work, gossip also helps promote cooperation in groups without a need for formal sanctioning mechanisms.
Altogether these findings demonstrate the rich and diverse social functions and effects of this ubiquitous human behavior and lay the groundwork for future investigations.
