1. What do we talk about?
We talk all day, about very different topics. But where do we talk about; about the
weather, about other people, about tomorrow? And why do we talk about these things?
These issues concern the goals and functions of our conversations.
Baumeister, R.F., Zhang, L., & Vohs, K.D. (2004). Gossip as cultural learning.
Review of General Psychology, 8, 111-121.
Gossip conveys potentially useful information about how or culture and society operate.
As cultures become more and more complex neither problems nor solutions can be easily
foreseen. So far the prominent view of gossip has been that gossip is malicious and aimed
at harming people and their reputation. It is plausible however that this is not the primary
goal of gossip and sometimes even irrelevant. Gossip can be regarded in several different
ways: First, it helps bonding people together because they share information about
themselves and others of their social community. The time spent together while doing
this is beneficial to the relationship as well. The hearer learns something about the target
person. Secondly, gossip conveys codes of conduct and moral rules embedded in concrete
stories, which can be regarded as observational learning of a cultural kind. Learning from
gossip enabled people to avoid making the same mistakes as the target. It might be that
the tendency to gossip has evolved with evolution as it an efficient way to learn how to
behave in order not to be excluded. Still, people don’t seem to gossip out of the desire to
teach or learn, but just for the pleasure of it. Gossip tends to be negative, as negativity is
more efficient in conveying rules and norms than stories about how somebody followed
the rules (bad is stronger than good). Men tend to gossip more about politicians,
celebrities and people from broader social sphere, while women tend to gossip about
friends or family members. Gossip is more efficient to learn about rules than just
explaining the rules in the abstract because it is more vivid, e.g. when parent tells child
about another child that was hurt in an accident after it ran onto the street. In this example
the gossip is not told as a form of aggression against the hurt child, but to illustrate a
point. Children start to gossip as soon as they can talk, they tend to believe gossip more
often when they get older, probably because they start to see the importance of
information about others. In organizations gossip is an important way to find out which
“off record behavior” is expected. In nonliterate cultures it is the most important way of
information management. Studies show that participants judged gossips harshly when the
sole purpose was to derogate a person, but not when there was a lesson to learn from the
story. One third of gossip is positive, one third negative and one third mixed. Gossip is
much more effective to inform people because it is focus on their (sub-) culture and much
faster and efficient than any centralized form of information about social norms. Gossip
is mostly accepted as true without further questioning and invites people to comment on
it even though they might not have any background information. By distancing oneself
from the misbehavior of others, one’s social status can be elevated. Gossip brings about
mostly negative emotions, but also positive ones as well as surprise. The more negative
the emotions, the more the people said they learned something from the gossip. What has
been learned is mostly stated in terms of general rather than specific guidelines.
We talk all day, about very different topics. But where do we talk about; about the
weather, about other people, about tomorrow? And why do we talk about these things?
These issues concern the goals and functions of our conversations.
Baumeister, R.F., Zhang, L., & Vohs, K.D. (2004). Gossip as cultural learning.
Review of General Psychology, 8, 111-121.
Gossip conveys potentially useful information about how or culture and society operate.
As cultures become more and more complex neither problems nor solutions can be easily
foreseen. So far the prominent view of gossip has been that gossip is malicious and aimed
at harming people and their reputation. It is plausible however that this is not the primary
goal of gossip and sometimes even irrelevant. Gossip can be regarded in several different
ways: First, it helps bonding people together because they share information about
themselves and others of their social community. The time spent together while doing
this is beneficial to the relationship as well. The hearer learns something about the target
person. Secondly, gossip conveys codes of conduct and moral rules embedded in concrete
stories, which can be regarded as observational learning of a cultural kind. Learning from
gossip enabled people to avoid making the same mistakes as the target. It might be that
the tendency to gossip has evolved with evolution as it an efficient way to learn how to
behave in order not to be excluded. Still, people don’t seem to gossip out of the desire to
teach or learn, but just for the pleasure of it. Gossip tends to be negative, as negativity is
more efficient in conveying rules and norms than stories about how somebody followed
the rules (bad is stronger than good). Men tend to gossip more about politicians,
celebrities and people from broader social sphere, while women tend to gossip about
friends or family members. Gossip is more efficient to learn about rules than just
explaining the rules in the abstract because it is more vivid, e.g. when parent tells child
about another child that was hurt in an accident after it ran onto the street. In this example
the gossip is not told as a form of aggression against the hurt child, but to illustrate a
point. Children start to gossip as soon as they can talk, they tend to believe gossip more
often when they get older, probably because they start to see the importance of
information about others. In organizations gossip is an important way to find out which
“off record behavior” is expected. In nonliterate cultures it is the most important way of
information management. Studies show that participants judged gossips harshly when the
sole purpose was to derogate a person, but not when there was a lesson to learn from the
story. One third of gossip is positive, one third negative and one third mixed. Gossip is
much more effective to inform people because it is focus on their (sub-) culture and much
faster and efficient than any centralized form of information about social norms. Gossip
is mostly accepted as true without further questioning and invites people to comment on
it even though they might not have any background information. By distancing oneself
from the misbehavior of others, one’s social status can be elevated. Gossip brings about
mostly negative emotions, but also positive ones as well as surprise. The more negative
the emotions, the more the people said they learned something from the gossip. What has
been learned is mostly stated in terms of general rather than specific guidelines.
