livinggossip.com Gossip. Despite the old saying, “I don’t have anything nice to say,” all humans engage in gossip in one form or another.livinggossip.com Whether it’s chatting at work, sharing family news, or sending group texts among friends, it’s inevitable that everyone we talk to is talking about other people. In fact, a 1993 observational study found that male participants spent 55% of their conversation time and female participants spent 67% of their conversation time “discussing socially important topics.”
Many people think of gossip as synonymous
with malicious rumors, disparaging words, and passionate promotion of sensational scoops. However, researchers often define it more broadly. “Talking about people who don’t exist,” says Megan Robbins, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. “It comes very naturally to us” and livinggossip.com is an integral part of conversation, information sharing, and even community building.
“It’s not necessarily a negative thing,” adds David Ludden, a psychology professor at Georgia Gwinnett College and author of “Psychology of Language: An Integrative Approach.” “Sometimes it’s positive, sometimes it’s neutral.”
In a meta-analysis published in Social Psychology and Personality Science in 2019, Robbins and his colleagues found that 467 subjects spent an average of 52 minutes a day gossiping and found that three-quarters of it was actually neutral; for example, one participant talked about people watching a lot of movies to keep up. “It was kind of boring,” Robbins said. “It wasn’t obscene or negative at all.”
Only about 15% of the conversations analyzed were considered negative gossip (though even fewer were positive — just 9%). So while it’s true that people can spend a considerable amount of time talking about their peers, that chatter is usually harmless.
Why do people gossip?
Some researchers claim that gossip helped livinggossip.com our ancestors survive. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar was the first to propose this idea, comparing gossip to the grooming that primates use as a means of bonding. Instead of cleaning fleas and dirt off each other to bond, Ludden says, we now talk, and “that’s where gossip comes in, because talk is mostly about other people.” “It’s talking about other people and conveying social information.”
According to Dunbar’s research, gossip gives humans the ability to spread valuable information across very large social networks. “If we can’t discuss these [social and personal] issues, we can’t maintain the kind of society we have now,” she wrote in the Review of General Psychology in 2003. This is explained in an article published in . “Gossip in this broad sense plays a variety of roles in maintaining livinggossip.com the social functioning of groups over time.”
“We are much more social [than our evolutionary ancestors],” Ludden says. “So if this network is too large for us to observe on our own, getting information about people [from others] can be very useful.”
Some scholars consider gossip to be evidence of cultural learning, providing teachable moments and giving people examples of what is and isn’t socially acceptable. For example, if someone in a community or social circle livinggossip.com frequently cheats and people start talking negatively about that person, the collective criticism should alert others to the consequences of cheating, Robbins says. And since rumors almost inevitably reach the source of the gossip, “morally speaking, it helps keep people in check,” Robbins adds.
What happens physiologically when people gossip?
In a study published in the journal Social Neuroscience in 2015, scientists examined brain images of men and women who listened to positive and negative gossip about themselves, their best friends, and celebrities. People who heard good, bad, and generally negative gossip about themselves had more livinggossip.com activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is key to the ability to navigate complex social behaviors.
This activity indicates that the subjects responded to the gossip and its ideas. The authors claim that this is related to the desire to be viewed positively by others and to fit in socially, regardless of whether this reflects how one actually feels.
The study also found that the brain’s reward center, the caudate nucleus, was activated in response to negative gossip about celebrities. The subjects seemed livinggossip.com amused and entertained by the celebrities’ salacious scandals. (In addition to what the participants’ brain images revealed, the researchers also investigated how the participants felt. Unsurprisingly, participants were more likely to hear positive gossip about themselves than about others.) I found it more irritating to hear negative gossip about myself.
So is gossip good for you?
“People are very reluctant to think of gossip as anything other than bad behavior,” Robbins says. Feinberg also points out that there are other types of gossip to avoid, such as gossip that is genuinely harmful and serves no purpose, like mean comments about someone’s appearance.
In such a scenario, Robbins adds, “nothing is learned.” “No one is benefiting.”
There is also a physiological distinction between active and passive participation in gossip. Matthew Feinberg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and his colleagues investigated this in a 2012 study published in the Journal livinggossip.com of Personality and Social Psychology. When subjects heard about other people’s antisocial behavior or injustice, their heart rates increased. On the other hand, subjects who were able to actively gossip about the person or situation found that it calmed them down and lowered their heart rates. Gossip livinggossip.com “helps calm you down,” Feinberg explains.
In addition,
Feinberg’s research found that gossip can promote cooperation by spreading important information. “When people say, ‘Your reputation is better than yours,’ it’s because they’ve heard gossip about that person,” he says. “It can be very helpful.” However, there is no social benefit to spreading or failing to livinggossip.com correct rumors that you know are false.
In another study by Feinberg, a group of participants identified members who behaved selfishly through gossip and promptly expelled them. In this study, participants were divided into subgroups and each person was given points worth a small amount of money. Each participant can either donate these points to the group (in which case they are doubled and redistributed equally) or keep them. Participants replayed the game in different groups, knowing the decisions of their fellow participants. Importantly, participants can tell the new group who donated and how much in previous exercises and vote to completely eliminate from the round those who behaved selfishly.
conclusion
After eliminating these bad apples, the remaining participants were able to work more harmoniously and increase their overall earnings. livinggossip.com Those who donated less than half of their points increased their contributions at the end of subsequent rounds, while those who were eliminated significantly more due to their selfless behavior after being allowed back into the game made a donation.
