Gossip Is Good for Us—Not Just a Guilty Pleasure
So why does it feel like one...?
This is a pro-gossip post. I wanted to acknowledge right off the bat, though, that careless or malicious gossip can cause immense psychological harm: Bad gossip is a destroyer of lives and friendships. As someone who has spent a lot of time working with adolescents (and just as a human being who interacts with other human beings), I take those risks seriously.
That said…there are a lot of benefits that stem from gossip, and there seems to be a growing consensus that it is a natural, and useful, human behavior. A world in which people have no ability to talk about one another would (quite obviously, I think) be a nightmarish one to live in.
Among friends and family, the gossip-is-good drum is one I’ve been beating for quite a while. Yet since I first became fixated on this idea, about five years ago, I’ve slowly come to accept that despite the sound arguments in its favor (I’ll run through them in greater detail below), gossip still feels like a guilty pleasure for most of us. What’s up with this? Gossip is good for individuals, good for relationships, and good for society as a whole—yet it continues to bring the thrill of a minor transgression.
If ~tea~ is so natural, so healthy, why are we afraid of getting burned?
Some Definitions and Statistics
I’m going to pull the old “the dictionary defines gossip as…” trick—sorry. Even though we all know it when we hear it, I just want to highlight a few key criteria:
Dictionary.com—“idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others”
Merriam Webster—“rumor or report of an intimate nature; a chatty talk”
Google dictionary thing—“casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true”
Let’s just grant that there’s not a hard line between what is or isn’t gossip. Instead, I’ll use these as a jumping-off point for what constitutes a quintessential piece of gossip, and refine it a bit more later. I see two main factors in the definitions above:
Topic—Gossip is about other people, especially behaviors that are “personal or private” or “intimate.”
Tone—Gossip has an air of frivolity or informality (“idle,” “chatty,” “casual or unrestrained”).
(Is it possible that someone could “gossip” about the policies of a whole company, or the squirrels in their yard? The official details of a tragic accident? Sure—but I don’t think these are what we tend to mean when we call something gossip. Drawing on the assumptions of prototype theory, it’s not that an impersonal/more serious report couldn’t fit in the gossip bucket at all—it just doesn’t fit as well as, say, speculation about whether two colleagues are sleeping together.)
Note that gossip is not inherently negative or false—although (per last definition) a lot of gossip may be unconfirmed by its spreader.
In fact, we already have a word for false, negative rumors: slander. I’m certainly not advocating for slander. I think it’s safe to say that most gossip does not deserve this label, however. Although gossip may have a negative impact on someone’s reputation, I’d argue that people don’t usually have malicious motives when they spread it—and surely most rumors are considered true, or at least plausible, by the gossiper.
Of course, negative, unverified gossip raises the most interesting ethical questions here, and we’ll do a deeper dive on those shortly. First, though, I’d like to quickly run through some descriptive statistics on gossip. I’ve pulled these from a 2019 meta-analysis, which is referenced in both articles linked at the top of this post:
Prevalence—From the analysis: “Our study, directly sampling daily conversation, estimated that people gossiped in approximately 14%, compared to past estimates of 66%, of conversations.” They attribute this wide disparity to their definition of gossip as sharing information about a nonpresent individual vs. past definitions including any discussion of social topics. So I guess the answer to How much of conversation is gossip? is Depends how you define it, but probably closer to “a solid chunk” than “most.” Buttt 🤷♂️.
Valence—Of thousands of instances of gossip, the vast majority (n = 2,974) were neutral. Of evaluative gossip, negative judgments (n = 604) were almost twice as likely as positive ones (n = 376).
Subject—About 90% of gossip was about someone the gossiper knew (n = 3,292) vs. about a celebrity (n = 369). (The authors call the first category “acquaintances,” and include friends, family, coworkers, and romantic partners in it; I really wish they’d given a more specific breakdown here, but I guess that would require inferring study participants’ relationships to various people based on context clues, or participants filling out a lot of surveys.)
Topic—Gossip was almost entirely about social information (n = 3,688) vs. physical appearance (n = 180) or achievement (n = 159). (To me, “social information” seems way broader than the other two categories…but I guess interesting to note that physical appearance and achievement were not discussed that frequently.)
Personality—Authors report that extraverted people gossip more and that “the largest effect of all the meta-analytic results was the association between extraversion and neutral gossip.” Agreeableness also associated with more neutral gossip.
Gender—“Small effects indicating females gossiped more than males,” but little to no evidence women are more likely to engage in evaluative gossip.
Age—Younger people are more likely to engage in negative gossip.
Class—“Those with higher incomes tended to neutrally gossip more than those with lower incomes.”
Obviously, this is just one study (granted, a meta-analysis), so take these findings with a grain of salt. The fact that there are no shocking results, and that there are no super strong effects other than a relationship between extraversion and neutral gossip, makes me inclined to believe them, though.
The Straightforward Case for Gossip
The benefits of gossip fall into three somewhat-overlapping buckets: the personal, the interpersonal, and the societal.
Again, my argument is not that there are never any downsides to gossip but that on net, its benefits clearly outweigh its costs. By extension, we should not feel guilty about engaging in (most forms of) gossip.
On an individual level, gossip offers the simple pleasures of venting and dishing. Gossip lends significance to the daily dramas and ethical dilemmas of our lives, however small they may appear from the outside. What other outlets are available to us, to air our frustrations with that shitty boss, that noisy neighbor, that one ex who weirdly always referred to his parents by their first names (not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, but like he did always have this thing about authority—just saying…there could be something there…)?
From a utility-enhancing perspective, gossip provides key information that we use to make decisions in our lives. This American Life drives this point home in Act I of their wonderful episode on gossip, about the AIDS epidemic in Malawi. In the story, speculation over who has HIV and who has slept with whom is a major topic of conversation—with obvious and direct implications for mate selection and public health. While most of us in the United States are fortunate not to face a daily threat of contracting HIV, we certainly benefit from learning the reputations of potential friends or partners—whether they are unreliable, clingy, creepy, or worse. (Or to draw an even more direct analogy: whether they have COVID.)
Because of this mutually beneficial exchange of social information, gossip builds interpersonal trust and establishes shared values. To pass along neutral news (“Did you hear so-and-so sold their house?”) is to prove oneself trustworthy in the most basic sense: One can be relied upon to provide an accurate map of the shared social world. To engage in evaluative gossip, goes a step further, affirming the alignment of both parties’ moral compasses.
This is no small leap of faith. (Not all “What do you think of so-and-so?”s are met with an equally forthcoming response…) In fact, research has found that negative gossip in particular “establishes in-group/out-group boundaries, boosts self-esteem, and conveys highly diagnostic information about attitude holders” (Bosson, Johnson, Niederhoffer, & Swann, 2006). While these ends can be achieved by other, more formal, methods, gossip provides an especially memorable and accessible means by which to negotiate the bounds of acceptable behavior.
At the highest level, gossip provides a cheap, nonviolent reason for people to care about their reputations—and, we hope, treating others in a way that warrants those good reputations. Consider the alternatives: Without gossip, how can society respond to a compulsive liar, say, or a serial philanderer—especially if they have not actually broken the law? Vigilante justice? Investigative journalism? (Of course, gossip may also not succeed in keeping bad behavior in check. I’m sure we can all think of people whose shameless willingness to violate norms ends up serving as a kind of superpower…) Gossip is the glue that holds our norms in place and punishes bad actors.
In short: Gossip has emotional/relational benefits, provides useful social information, and serves as an elegant mechanism to establish and encourage standards of good behavior.
Some Common Counterarguments and Rebuttals
How can you say that gossip builds interpersonal trust? Doesn’t gossip erode trust by making people worried that others will talk about them behind their backs.
In exchange for receiving valuable social information, we have to accept that others may talk about us in return. This trade is worth it, and though it may occasionally lower the level of trust within a given relationship, it surely strengthens the bonds throughout a community on the whole.
That said, reckless gossip can absolutely have corrosive effects, and the best way to combat those effects is to model a more responsible version of it. (More thoughts on this later, but in general: talking about others in a way that is fair and thoughtful, if not always supportive of their decisions.) Recall, too, that older people were found to engage in less negative gossip, so perhaps this is something we tend to get better at navigating over time.
Don’t rumors have a tendency to become exaggerated/less true as they spread?
Yes. But again, the tradeoff is worth it, especially if we make an effort to avoid wild speculation, consider gossipers’ motives, and trace where information is coming from. Most gossip is surely based in truth.
What about confidentiality?
I agree that people have a right to confidentiality in some circumstances (sometimes legally)—and of course we have different degrees of allegiance to different people in our lives. If one party has an expectation of confidentiality and the other does not, that obviously raises ethical questions.
It also raises the question, however, of why the person wants confidentiality: Is it because the information is truly private, or are they just selfishly trying to conceal their own bad behavior? In the (formalized) case of NDAs, for example, confidentiality could be a totally legitimate way to protect proprietary information—or it could be a weapon used to cover up sexual assault. Similarly, if you confess to your friend that you’re planning to break up with your partner soon, confidentiality seems totally appropriate, if not the obvious moral choice to protect your soon-to-be ex; if, on the other hand, you confess that you’ve been having an affair, you put your friend in the difficult position of weighing their desire to protect you vs. a duty to report your indiscretion.
As a general rule, it would not be reasonable to expect that everything you tell someone, even a close friend or loved one, stays between the two of you. People talk.
What about things that the subject can’t control? What “greater good” does it serve if everyone is talking about my receding hairline or how annoying my voice is?
I think this is a fair point (again, more on responsible gossip later). I’d also refer back to descriptive statistics again: Whereas there were 3,688 instances of gossip about social information in the study, only 180 were about physical appearance—and the vast majority in general was neutral.
Why Does Gossip Feel Like a Guilty Pleasure?
This is the part where we move from the land of the vaguely scientific into true armchair-expert territory.
Methodologically, all I’m doing here is thinking about my own experience as a spreader, subject, and recipient of gossip, and trying to extrapolate from that. (I claim no unique authority in this domain—and in fact, to the extent that gossiping is a skill, it’s not something I even consider myself that good at.)
Of course, some gossip feels transgressive because, well, it’s an actual transgression. You should feel guilty about slandering someone, or when the subject has an explicit expectation of confidentiality. What I’m interested in here is gossip that shouldn’t really be wrong, for the reasons already discussed, but nevertheless feels transgressive. For the remainder of this essay, I’ll also refer to this kind of guilty-pleasure gossip by the shorthand “juicy.”
One possible explanation for the guilty pleasure feeling: Norms and intuitions have not yet caught up with the modern psychological understanding of gossip. At one point in history, after all, it would have been transgressive to say the earth revolved around the sun, or for a woman to wear pants; now, these feel completely normal to most of us. Could it be that as gossip becomes more socially acceptable, it will also stop feeling so juicy?
I’m skeptical of this explanation. Guilt aside, gossip will always be delicious for the same reason sugar is: Surely those early humans who were better at exchanging social information stood a greater chance of survival; we’re evolutionarily wired to enjoy gossip. Furthermore, even if gossip does become more acceptable, that doesn’t mean it will cease to be secretive and fun. After all, there are plenty of activities we consider perfectly healthy but inappropriate to do out in the open, like medical procedures, discussing our finances, and sex (not coincidentally all good topics for gossip!). Privacy doesn’t necessarily suggest “guilty pleasure,” but it does make me think that gossip will always retain the allure of a scarce resource—one that, by definition, is limited to a select subset of people. If gossip were public, it would just be news.
This much, at the very least, seems obvious: Gossip stems from impure motives. Although gossip has prosocial benefits, anyone who says social good is their primary motivation for doing it is full of crap; clearly gossip is an intrinsically rewarding activity that happens to be good for society, too. So the simplest answer for why gossiping feels like a guilty pleasure is that we are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
But there are lots of good things we do for the wrong reasons. If I obey the speed limit because I’m afraid of getting a ticket, rather than concern for others’ safety, I don’t feel like I’m being a bad citizen. If a wealthy donor is inspired by seeing their name on the cancer wing of the hospital, that doesn’t mean they aren’t actually helping patients. So I’m not totally satisfied by this explanation either.
Another way into this question is to consider which factors make gossip feel more or less like a guilty pleasure. There is the salaciousness of the topic itself (presumably more private/reputationally damaging gossip is juicier)—but what else?
One answer that comes to mind is our closeness to subject/source of gossip. Here’s my crude attempt to map this out:
In this graph, each letter represents one act of gossip transmission. For example:
A—I tell you [private/embarrassing/unethical thing that I did]. Note that this part of the chain is not strictly necessary; you could also just have observed the incident in question.
B—You tell your friend about it.
C—Your friend tells their partner.
D—Your friend’s partner’s tells his mother.
E—Friend’s partner’s mother to her cousin: “I heard this crazy story about…”
Of course, the gossip is by no means guaranteed to make it all the way through this chain. In fact, it’s probably not even going to make it past C—your friend telling their partner. (You could also think of the Y-axis as the approximate % likelihood that the gossip will be passed along. I think the chances drop off pretty steeply after two degrees in most cases?) If the gossip does somehow make it to D or E, it’s lost a lot of its juiciness by virtue of your friend’s partner’s mother’s cousin having no clue who I am—which is a significant chunk of what makes it interesting in the first place. I might as well be a fictional character.
Note that gossip need not always ripple “outward,” from people who are close to the subject to those at a greater distance. It can also circulate at a single level (surely, a high percentage of gossip is passed along among people who are all at one degree of separation from the subject), and can even move inward (i.e., you somehow hear it from your friend who doesn’t personally know me).
(You might also be wondering why I put A is a quarter of the way up the Y-axis, rather than at zero. This is a compromise/approximation of sorts: Perhaps I’m “in” on the gossip and can see the juiciness in it as I tell you what happened. Or perhaps I’m mortified or tell you just as a way of processing some unpleasant experience—and it’s you who juices it up by dishing it to your friend.)
Obviously, this graph shouldn’t be taken literally, not only because it’s based on zero actual data (how would we measure juiciness anyway?), but because there are lots of other factors that determine the quality of the gossip. Even degrees of separation is more subjective than it might appear: Is “one degree” anyone in your community you’ve interacted with at all? Who you’ve had an extended conversation with? In my example, I called “your friend” two degrees (C) and “your friend’s partner” three degrees (D). But of course, if your friend’s partner has spent a considerable amount of time with you, he may be more like two degrees himself—and therefore more interested in hearing the tea.
As silly as this graph is, it does remind me that the position of maximal juiciness is generally close to the drama but not at the heart of it. When I tell you about a crazy interaction I had, even if I’m not the focus of the story, I’d argue that this generally isn’t as juicy as you reporting the interaction to some third party who knows me. For example…
Quiz #1: Which scenario below do you imagine would be the juiciest exchange?
A) You tell your close friend that your ex drunkenly sexted you.
B) Your close friend tells a mutual third friend that your ex drunkenly sexted you.
C) One of your friends tells their colleague that your ex drunkenly sexted you.
Again, it’s not that A or C are not juicy—the material itself is pretty salacious—but they’re not as juicy as B, I think. (“Oh my God. You would not believe what so-and-so’s ex sent them…”) If you’re actively involved in a situation, even a situation you feel is funny or interesting, it’s not entirely shits and giggles; it’s your life. You likely have some real choices to make about how you respond—the burden of having to deal with your ex’s awkward apology/solicitation, for example. On the other hand, if one is too far removed from a situation, the gossip isn’t much of a guilty pleasure because, well, there’s no guilt: It’s just a story about a colleague’s friend to whom one has no personal connection.
In fact, even if you’re not actively involved in a situation, I think your proximity to the subject can sometimes make the gossip feel less juicy. That is, if you are very close to the person involved (e.g., a partner, best friend, or family member), your identification with them can increase sympathy at the expense of delicious schadenfreude.
A Grand Theory of Juiciness
It strikes me that there’s some kind of Goldilocks principle here: a sweet spot in how close you are to the subject that determines how much of a “guilty pleasure” the gossip is. And I’m starting to think that there’s a similar effect going on with some other variables. Let me show you what I mean with two more hypotheticals…
Quiz #2: Which is the juiciest gossip scenario:
A) People generally agree that the CEO of your company is an asshole.
B) Your colleague tells you they heard that the CEO of your company threw a stapler at someone.
C) Your company releases a statement that your CEO is stepping down over accusations of a hostile work environment. (The stapler incident and a number of other examples are cited.)
Again, it’s B, right? The juicy middle of having some details, but not knowing everything. (What was the context? Is it a pattern of behavior?) Option A is less exciting because of its vagueness. Option C is certainly explosive news, and likely to engender more gossip in its wake, but there’s no mystery here: It’s official—he did it. It’s on the record. Last but not least…
Quiz #3: Which is the juiciest piece of gossip:
A) Your neighbor likes to beat their dog with a hockey stick.
B) Your neighbor likes to push their dog around in a stroller, and once attempted to breastfeed it.
C) Your neighbor likes to go for jogs with their dog.
I mean, do I even have to say it…?
Initially, my intuition was that unambiguous transgressions would be the juiciest to gossip about, but on closer examination, I don’t think this is true. A really awful example of abuse isn’t exactly fun to talk about, even if we may get a certain satisfaction from passing judgment on the perpetrator or sympathizing with the victim. A clear but less severe transgression is juicier because it presents an opportunity for righteous outrage without feeling like we’re minimizing the harm to the victim. But the juiciest cases of all are the ones that are morally ambiguous, offering an opportunity for vigorous debate. (You: “Poor woman. She must want a baby so badly.” Me: “Are you kidding? It’s sick what she’s doing to that poor animal. She should just adopt.”)
So building out this Goldilocks principle—the idea that juicy gossip exists in some kind of sweet spot along various continua—here’s my (very speculative) answer as to what makes gossip feel transgressive: The feeling we label “guilty pleasure” is actually an expression of social risk or uncertainty.
In other words, the juiciest gossip is a gamble, based on a lot of unknowns: Are we righteously policing someone’s reputation—or are we inadvertently spreading false rumors? Would the subject care that we are talking about them—or would they consider it a betrayal of trust (and what are the chances they find out it was us who spilled the beans)? Is the behavior even something the subject should be ashamed of? If we have a firm answer to any of these questions, the gossip stops feeling so juicy because it tips into pure guilt (i.e., it’s blatantly unethical to discuss) or pure pleasure (i.e., it’s just a fun conversation, with no obvious downsides). When the gossip is somewhere in the middle, that’s the good stuff.
This risk/uncertainty of juicy gossip is exciting because if you consistently make good bets, then you increase your social capital (you’re in the know, you have a good read on people, etc.). But if you make a bad one, your own reputation takes a hit (you’re disloyal, gullible, judgmental, or a slanderer). Observe your mind closely when you gossip, and I think you will find it bears the subtle imprint of other social activity that is risky/uncertain but highly rewarding: the giddiness of romantic pursuit, of going all-in to call a bluff, of wondering whether a performer will pull off an unusually difficult feat.
Of course, a more conservative approach to this risk/reward tradeoff is to only talk about others when events are verified, when you have a high degree of moral clarity, or when you have little personal connection to the subject. That makes you less likely to offend, of course, but it also makes you pretty boring to hang out with…
Please Gossip Responsibly
Just a few final thoughts on what norms for gossip, especially juicy gossip, might look like if we hope to maximize its benefits and minimize its costs:
Embrace moral gray—Fear of harsh moral judgment is, I think, at the heart of a kneejerk resistance to gossip. We (rightfully) worry about an ethic of unchecked disparagement toward others in our community. Contrary to popular belief, however, gossip need not be all negative—and in fact, I would argue that the juiciest gossip is often that which involves a high degree of moral ambiguity (see Quiz #3 above). Trying to understand what on earth the subject was thinking doesn’t make the gossip any less interesting—and it’s some comfort to know that if people are going to talk about us, they’re at least making an attempt at even-handed treatment, rather than pure petty backbiting.
Try to trace sources and motives—We can’t always verify whether gossip is factually accurate, but we can try to estimate how likely it is to be true. Make an effort to find out where a given piece of gossip came from; consider how long the chain of telephone was, and the relationship between the subject and each person in the chain, before jumping to any definitive conclusions.
Be sparing in your requests for confidentiality—As stated earlier, I’m skeptical of a broad right to confidentiality whenever we want it, even from close friends and loved ones. (Of course, sometimes it’s a totally legitimate ask!) If you’re generally on good behavior and have good people in your life, trust that your reputation will prevail. If something is really secret, just put it in your diary or tell your therapist about it. (Of course, they may tell other people, too—just not people whose opinion you care about.)
Avoid passing judgment on things the subject can’t control—I think this is pretty self-explanatory, and something most of us figure out naturally as we mature/develop a greater sense of empathy, but I figured it doesn’t hurt to throw it on here.
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TL;DR
For individuals, gossip offers significant emotional and informational benefits. Throughout society, gossip builds trust in relationships and incentivizes good behavior.
More speculatively: The feeling we label “guilty pleasure” may in fact stem from social, epistemic, or moral ambiguity—i.e., the more risky/rewarding a piece of gossip is to spread, the juicier it becomes.