Spreading news about someone behind his or her back can make you look petty and shallow—like if you’re complaining to your spouse about someone’s poor fashion sense or nervous tick. This is because much of the time, the only thing that gossiping accomplishes is hurting the reputation of the person being talked about.
But gossip doesn’t always fall into that “bad’ category—oftentimes it’s much more complex than that.
Say your friend has been alone for many years and tells you that she’s interested in getting serious with a new boyfriend, but you’ve heard through the grapevine that this particular guy has cheated on numerous past girlfriends. Do you warn your friend? You don’t know for sure that he was unfaithful, and even if he was, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll stray again.
So…gossip or don’t gossip?
The authors of a new study would say that sharing this type of information would help protect others and also may have a positive effect on your health because it falls under a category that they would call “prosocial” gossip. To learn more about what that means and why they think it’s a good idea, I called the study’s coauthors, Robb Willer, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Feinberg, a psychology grad student there.
Instead of looking at gossip that’s intended to either advance the position of the gossiper (“My husband just got a six-figure book deal”) or damage someone else’s reputation (“John got promoted before I did only because he’s good-looking”), the researchers wanted to investigate the type of gossip that warns other people about those who are selfish or untrustworthy.
To do this, they devised a series of experiments to see how and when people would engage in “prosocial” gossip. In one experiment, researchers hooked up 52 undergraduate male and female subjects to heart-rate monitors and watched their reactions to two people playing a game. They deliberately arranged for the subjects to observe one player cheating—and when the subjects witnessed this exploitative behavior, they reported feeling frustrated and their heart rates rose, demonstrating stress, which of course is not good for your health.
But interestingly, participants’ increases in heart rate were calmed when they got the chance to slip a “gossip note” to a new player—a note warning him or her to be careful because someone else was playing selfishly. And when asked how relieved or better they felt after sending the note, students expressed lower levels of frustration than before.
I asked Dr. Willer why he thought that passing along this gossipy information made such a difference to the gossiper. He said that people tend to feel relieved by the idea that a selfish person has been “caught” and therefore will be less able to dupe or hurt others in the future.
In Feinberg’s view, we shouldn’t hesitate to gossip—nor should we feel guilty after we do it—as long as the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of.
