Did you hear about Karen and Sam last night?
Questions like that are certainly hard to resist. But why do we enjoy gossiping so much?
According to David Ludden writing for Psychology Today, information about other people gives us access to intimate details of the people in our social network. It helps us facilitate conversations and find common ground.
Furthermore, hearsay serves as a supplementary social tool in the process of building relationships. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has compared our proclivity to communicate to the social grooming habits of chimpanzees. Among primates, friendships are built and maintained through the practice of picking fleas, dirt, and debris from the fur of other members of the group. According to Dunbar, the human form of social grooming is small talk, and serves the same social networking purpose that reciprocal grooming does for chimpanzees.
Another compelling theory explaining our need to know the business of those around us suggests it's because the tickling rumors and shocking gossip are ultimately about ourselves- where we stand in the social hierarchy and how we might improve our rating.
“Gossip recipients tend to use positive and negative group information to improve, promote and protect the self,” writes a research team led by Elena Martinescu of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, whose study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “Individuals need evaluative information about others to evaluate themselves.”
For better or for worse, gossip is the fuel firing our social lives. From celebrity tabloids to the coffee break room, talking about other people is arguably America's other favorite pastime.
