Do you want me to tell you why “x” left the company? And shall I tell you the real reason “y” got promoted? For many of us, the answer to such juicy gossip has to be an emphatic yes.
We appear to be hard-wired to enjoy gossip. The sales of celebrity gossip magazines and the fact that Kardashian-esque publicity stunts get headlines are testament to our predilection for dubious discourse. Some people even get a high from being the bearers of news about other people’s triumphs and tragedies. Perhaps it gives us a sense of power and shows off just how well-informed we are.
The world's great moral traditions say much about the danger and damage of excessive and malicious gossip. The Quran has a chapter titled Al Humaza (The scandalmonger), which warns: “Woe to every kind of scandalmonger and backbiter” (Sura 104:1).
But what about more benign forms of gossip – let's call it as psychologists do, “reputational information sharing” – is that harmful or helpful? A recent study published in Psychological Science found that when work groups were allowed to ostracise bad teammates on the basis of gossip, task performance improved. In other words, sharing information about who the back-stabbers and free-riders were was beneficial.
It can be argued that benign gossip acts as a social adhesive, bringing people together. Prof Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, suggests that language may have evolved to enable our prehistoric ancestors to live in larger groups, with the ability to talk about an absent third party an essential ingredient for social cohesion.
But gossip can often damage relationships. Maliciously focusing attention on the flaws of an absent third party can become habitual for some of us, simply because it makes us feel better about ourselves. This destructive type of gossip allows us to perform, something psychologists term downwards social comparisons – focusing on how we are superior to someone else in some way or other. As a general rule-of-thumb, upwards social comparisons make us feel bad about ourselves, while downwards comparisons make us feel good.
So is gossip good or bad? Perhaps the answer is that it is homoeopathic: in small benign doses it helps protect us from getting involved with bad apples, while also acting as a social adhesive and a mild mood-enhancer. Unfortunately, in larger doses gossip becomes toxic, bringing about misery and mistrust.
But it's not just the dose (the amount of gossip), we also have to look at the type of gossip. Consider, for example, what I call dissonant gossip, which is when a person mixes malicious gossip with compliments. As a way to lessen the guilt associated with making mean disclosures, the dissonant gossiper compensates by saying something nice too.
Higher up the malicious gossip hierarchy, we have pathological gossip. With this, there is no mitigation, only incessant malicious vitriolic outpourings. The pathological gossiper tends to become increasingly extreme and scandalous. It's like they develop a tolerance, and have to work harder chasing the high gossip once gave them.
Finally, we have silent gossip. The silent gossiper has perfected the dark art of gossiping without gossiping. A simple raised eyebrow can often be enough to lead us to hugely negative conclusions about the absent third party.
In our increasingly online world, gossip has become exponentially problematic. Just as fame has been democratised (any kid with a video camera and YouTube account can become a star), so too has infamy. Gossip spread online, goes faster and further than it ever did before.
Gossip, however, will always be a double-edged sword. In the words of that great student of the human psyche, Oscar Wilde: “There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
