In
the past few years I have heard more people than ever before puzzling
over the 24/7 coverage of people such as Paris Hilton who are
“celebrities” for no apparent reason other than we know who they are.
And yet we can’t look away. The press about these individuals’ lives
continues because people are obviously tuning in. Although many social
critics have bemoaned this explosion of popular culture as if it
reflects some kind of collective character flaw, it is in fact nothing
more than the inevitable outcome of the collision between 21st-century
media and Stone Age minds.
When you cut away its many layers, our fixation on popular culture
reflects an intense interest in the doings of other people; this
preoccupation with the lives of others is a by-product of the
psychology that evolved in prehistoric times to make our ancestors
socially successful. Thus, it appears that we are hardwired to be
fascinated by gossip.
Only in the past decade or so have psychologists turned their
attention toward the study of gossip, partially because it is difficult
to define exactly what gossip is. Most researchers agree that the
practice involves talk about people who are not present and that this
talk is relaxed, informal and entertaining. Typically the topic of
conversation also concerns information that we can make moral judgments
about. Gossip appears to be pretty much the same wherever it takes
place; gossip among co-workers is not qualitatively different from that
among friends outside of work. Although everyone seems to detest a
person who is known as a “gossip” and few people would use that label
to describe themselves, it is an exceedingly unusual individual who can
walk away from a juicy story about one of his or her acquaintances, and
all of us have firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping
spectacular news about someone else a secret.
Why does private information about other people represent such an irresistible temptation for us? In his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
(Harvard University Press, 1996), psychologist Robin Dunbar of the
University of Liverpool in England suggested that gossip is a mechanism
for bonding social groups together, analogous to the grooming that is
found in primate groups. Sarah R. Wert, now at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, and Peter Salovey of Yale University have proposed
that gossip is one of the best tools that we have for comparing
ourselves socially with others. The ultimate question, however, is, How
did gossip come to serve these functions in the first place?
An Evolutionary Adaptation?
When evolutionary psychologists detect something that is shared by
people of all ages, times and cultures, they usually suspect that they
have stumbled on a vital aspect of human nature, something that became
a part of who we are in our long-forgotten prehistoric past.
Evolutionary adaptations that enabled us not only to survive but to
thrive in our prehistoric environment include our appreciation of
landscapes containing freshwater and vegetation, our never-ending
battle with our sweet tooth and our infatuation with people who look a
certain way.
It is obvious to most people that being drawn to locations that
offer resources, food that provides energy, and romantic partners who
appear able to help you bear and raise healthy children might well be
something that evolution has selected for because of its advantages. It
may not be so clear at first glance, however, how an interest in gossip
could possibly be in the same league as these other preoccupations. If
we think in terms of what it would have taken to be successful in our
ancestral social environment, the idea may no longer seem quite so
far-fetched.
As far as scientists can tell, our prehistoric forebears lived in
relatively small groups where they knew everyone else in a
face-to-face, long-term kind of way. Strangers were probably an
infrequent and temporary phenomenon. Our caveman ancestors had to
cooperate with so-called in-group members for success against
out-groups, but they also had to recognize that these same in-group
members were their main competitors when it came to dividing limited
resources. Living under such conditions, our ancestors faced a number
of consistent adaptive problems such as remembering who was a reliable
exchange partner and who was a cheater, knowing who would be a
reproductively valuable mate, and figuring out how to successfully
manage friendships, alliances and family relationships.
The
social intelligence needed for success in this environment required an
ability to predict and influence the behavior of others, and an intense
interest in the private dealings of other people would have been handy
indeed and would have been strongly favored by natural selection. In
short, people who were fascinated with the lives of others were simply
more successful than those who were not, and it is the genes of those
individuals that have come down to us through the ages. Like it or not,
our inability to forsake gossip and information about other individuals
is as much a part of who we are as is our inability to resist doughnuts
or sex—and for the same reasons.
A related social skill that would have had a big payoff is the
ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability and
past behavior of individuals who are personally known to you; there
would have been little use for a mind that was designed to engage in
abstract statistical thinking about large numbers of unknown outsiders.
In today’s world, it is advantageous to be able to think in terms of
probabilities and percentages when it comes to people, because
predicting the behavior of the strangers with whom we deal in everyday
life requires that we do so. This task is difficult for many of us
because the early wiring of the brain was guided by different needs.
Thus, natural selection shaped a thirst for, and a memory to store
information about, specific people; it is even well established that we
have a brain area specifically dedicated to the identification of human
faces.
For better or worse, this is the mental equipment we must rely on to
navigate our way through a modern world filled with technology and
strangers. I suppose I should not be surprised when the very same
psychology students who get glassy-eyed at any mention of statistical
data about human beings in general become riveted by case studies of
individuals experiencing psychological problems. Successful politicians
take advantage of this pervasive “power of the particular” (as
cognitive psychologists call it) when they use anecdotes and personal
narratives to make political points. Even Russian dictator Joseph
Stalin noted that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a
statistic.” The prevalence of reality TV shows and nightly news
programs focusing on stories about a missing child or the personal
gaffes of politicians is a beast of our own creation.
Is Gossip Always Bad?
The aspect of gossip that is most troubling is that in its rawest form
it is a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations
and selfish interests at the expense of others. This nasty side of
gossip usually overshadows the more benign ways in which it functions
in society. After all, sharing gossip with another person is a sign of
deep trust because you are clearly signaling that you believe that this
person will not use this sensitive information in a way that will have
negative consequences for you; shared secrets also have a way of
bonding people together. An individual who is not included in the
office gossip network is obviously an outsider who is not trusted or
accepted by the group.
There is ample evidence that when it is controlled, gossip can
indeed be a positive force in the life of a group. In a review of the
literature published in 2004, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State
University and his colleagues concluded that gossip can be a way of
learning the unwritten rules of social groups and cultures by resolving
ambiguity about group norms. Gossip is also an efficient way of
reminding group members about the importance of the group’s norms and
values; it can be a deterrent to deviance and a tool for punishing
those who transgress. Rutgers University evolutionary biologist Robert
Trivers has discussed the evolutionary importance of detecting “gross
cheaters” (those who fail to reciprocate altruistic acts) and “subtle
cheaters” (those who reciprocate but give much less than they get).
[For more on altruism and related behavior, see “The Samaritan Paradox,” by Ernst Fehr and Suzann-Viola Renninger; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue 2004.]
Gossip
can be an effective means of uncovering such information about others
and an especially useful way of controlling these “free riders” who may
be tempted to violate group norms of reciprocity by taking more from
the group than they give in return. Studies in real-life groups such as
California cattle ranchers, Maine lobster fishers and college rowing
teams confirm that gossip is used in these quite different settings to
enforce group norms when an individual fails to live up to the group’s
expectations. In all these groups, individuals who violated
expectations about sharing resources and meeting responsibilities
became frequent targets of gossip and ostracism, which applied pressure
on them to become better citizens. Anthropological studies of
hunter-gatherer groups have typically revealed a similar social control
function for gossip in these societies.
Anthropologist Christopher Boehm of the University of Southern California has proposed in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
(Harvard University Press, 1999) that gossip evolved as a “leveling
mechanism” for neutralizing the dominance tendencies of others. Boehm
believes that small-scale foraging societies such as those typical
during human prehistory emphasized an egalitarianism that suppressed
internal competition and promoted consensus seeking in a way that made
the success of one’s group extremely important to one’s own fitness.
These social pressures discouraged free riders and cheaters and
encouraged altruists. In such societies, the manipulation of public
opinion through gossip, ridicule and ostracism became a key way of
keeping potentially dominant group members in check.
Favored Types of Gossip
According to one of the pioneers of gossip research, anthropologist
Jerome Barkow of Dalhousie University, we should be especially
interested in information about people who matter most in our lives:
rivals, mates, relatives, partners in social exchange, and high-ranking
figures whose behavior can affect us. Given the proposition that our
interest in gossip evolved as a way of acquiring fitness-enhancing
information, Barkow also suggests that the type of knowledge that we
seek should be information that can affect our social standing relative
to others. Hence, we would expect to find higher interest in negative
news (such as misfortunes and scandals) about high-status people and
potential rivals because we could exploit it. Negative information
about those lower than us in status would not be as useful. There
should also be less interest in passing along negative information
about our friends and relatives than about people who are not allies.
Conversely, positive information (good fortune and sudden elevation of
status, for example) about allies should be likely to be spread around,
whereas positive information about nonallies should be less enticing
because it is not useful in advancing one’s own interests.
For a variety of reasons, our interest in the doings of same-sex
others ought to be especially strong. Because same-sex members of one’s
own species who are close to our own age are our principal evolutionary
competitors, we ought to pay special attention to them. The 18-year-old
male caveman would have done much better by attending to the business
of other 18-year-old males rather than the business of 50-year-old
males or females of any age. Interest about members of the other sex
should be strong only when their age and situational circumstances
would make them appropriate as mates.
The gossip studies that my students and I have worked on at Knox
College over the past decade have focused on uncovering what we are
most interested in finding out about other people and what we are most
likely to spread around. We have had people of all ages rank their
interest in tabloid stories about celebrities, and we have asked
college students to read gossip scenarios about unidentified
individuals and tell us about which types of people they would most
like to hear such information, about whom they would gossip and with
whom they would share gossip.
In keeping with the evolutionary
hypotheses suggested earlier, we have consistently found that people
are most interested in gossip about individuals of the same sex as
themselves who happen to be around their own age. We have also found
that information that is socially useful is always of greatest interest
to us: we like to know about the scandals and misfortunes of our rivals
and of high-status people because this information might be valuable in
social competition. Positive information about such people tends to be
uninteresting to us. Finding out that someone already higher in status
than ourselves has just acquired something that puts that person even
further ahead of us does not supply us with ammunition that we can use
to gain ground on him. Conversely, positive information about our
friends and relatives is very interesting and likely to be used to our
advantage whenever possible. For example, in studies that my colleagues
and I published in 2002 and in 2007 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology,
we consistently found that college students were not much interested in
hearing about academic awards or a large inheritance if it involved one
of their professors and that they were also not very interested in
passing that news along to others. Yet the same information about their
friends or romantic partners was rated as being quite interesting and
likely to be spread around.
We have also found that an interest in the affairs of same-sex
others is especially strong among females and that women have somewhat
different patterns of sharing gossip than men do. For example, our
studies reveal that males report being far more likely to share gossip
with their romantic partners than with anyone else, but females report
that they would be just as likely to share gossip with their same-sex
friends as with their romantic partners. And although males are usually
more interested in news about other males, females are virtually
obsessed with news about other females.
This fact can be demonstrated by looking at the actual frequency
with which males and females selected a same-sex person as the most
interesting subject of the gossip scenarios we presented them with in
one of our studies published in 2002. On hearing about someone having a
date with a famous person, 43 out of 44 women selected a female as the
most interesting person to know this about, as compared with 24 out of
36 males who selected a male as most interesting. Similarly, 40 out of
42 females (versus 22 out of 37 males) were most interested in same-sex
academic cheaters, and 39 out of 43 were most interested in a same-sex
leukemia sufferer (as opposed to only 18 out of 37 males). In fact, the
only two scenarios among the 13 we studied in which males expressed
more same-sex interest than females did involved hearing about an
individual heavily in debt because of gambling or an individual who was
having difficulty performing sexually.
Why Such Interest in Celebrities?
Even if we can explain the intense interest that we have in other
people who are socially important to us, how can we possibly explain
the seemingly useless interest that we have in the lives of
reality-show contestants, movie stars and public figures of all kinds?
One possible explanation may be found in the fact that celebrities are
a recent occurrence, evolutionarily speaking. In our ancestral
environment, any person about whom we knew intimate details of his or
her private life was, by definition, a socially important member of the
in-group. Barkow has pointed out that evolution did not prepare us to
distinguish among members of our community who have genuine effects on
our life and the images and voices that we are bombarded with by the
entertainment industry. Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities
provided by the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have
evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members. After all,
anyone whom we see that often and know that
much about must be socially important to us. News anchors and
television actors we see every day in soap operas become familiar
friends.
In our modern world, celebrities may also serve another
important social function. In a highly mobile, industrial society,
celebrities may be the only “friends” we have in common with our new
neighbors and co-workers. They provide a common interest and topic of
conversation between people who otherwise might not have much to say to
one another, and they facilitate the types of informal interaction that
help people become comfortable in new surroundings. Hence, keeping up
on the lives of actors, politicians and athletes can make a person more
socially adept during interactions with strangers and even provide
segues into social relationships with new friends in the virtual world
of the Internet. Research published in 2007 by Charlotte J. S. De
Backer, a Belgian psychologist now at the University of Leicester in
England, finds that young people even look to celebrities and popular
culture for learning life strategies that would have been learned from
role models within one’s tribe in the old days. Teenagers in particular
seem to be prone to learning how to dress, how to manage relationships
and how to be socially successful in general by tuning in to popular
culture.
Thus, gossip is a more complicated and socially important phenomenon
than we think. When gossip is discussed seriously, the goal usually is
to suppress the frequency with which it occurs in an attempt to avoid
the undeniably harmful effects it often has in work groups and other
social networks. This tendency, however, overlooks that gossip is part
of who we are and an essential part of what makes groups function as
well as they do. Perhaps it may become more productive to think of
gossip as a social skill rather than as a character flaw, because it is
only when we do not do it well that we get into trouble. Adopting the
role of the self-righteous soul who refuses to participate in gossip at
work or in other areas of your social life ultimately will be
self-defeating. It will turn out to be nothing more than a ticket to
social isolation. On the other hand, becoming that person who
indiscriminately blabs everything you hear to anyone who will listen
will quickly get you a reputation as an untrustworthy busybody.
Successful gossiping is about being a good team player and sharing key
information with others in a way that will not be perceived as
self-serving and about understanding when to keep your mouth shut.
In short, I believe we will continue to struggle with managing the
gossip networks in our daily lives and to shake our heads at what we
are constantly being subjected to by the mass media, rationally
dismissing it as irrelevant to anything that matters in our own lives.
But in case you find yourself becoming just a tiny bit intrigued by
some inane story about a celebrity, let yourself off the hook and enjoy
the guilty pleasure. After all, it is only human nature.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Can Gossip Be Good?"
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