Gossip Is Good For You!

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Academic Journal
Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Mental Health
Article Date: 19 Jan 2012 - 9:00 PST

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Fed up with listening to your spouse or co-workers gossiping away? Leave be, says a new research from University of California Berkeley. Gossip helps to prevent bad behavior, prevent exploitation and reduces stress levels.

Gossiping can also be therapeutic, the volunteers' heart rates appeared to increase when hearing gossip, but lowered again once they passed on the information to someone else. A problem shared is a problem halved indeed.

UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of the study, published in this month's online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, said :

"Gossip gets a bad rap, but we're finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order ... Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip."

It seems as social animals we have a strong urge to pass on unsavory information to others, and people even spent their own money in the study, using a "gossip note" they had to pay for during an economic game in which participants could warn people about to play against cheaters. The researchers suggest that people shouldn't feel bad about passing on information if it is likely to help those involved, exposing vices or protecting someone against exploitation.

Willer points out, however, that the study was focused on the positive sides of gossip, passing on useful information or "prosocial" warnings about untrustworthy or dishonest people. The study did not look at the typical tabloid type gossip involving celebrities and their personal issues. This author would suspect that this type of gossip is an almost imaginary or invented version of the more positive prosocial / protective gossip, in that the behavior of a celebrity with a drug or marital problem doesn't necessarily have any real or immediate effect on our daily well-being, although perhaps studying the behavior and mistakes of famous people, might help those spectators avoid those kinds of life path mistakes themselves.

The researchers at Berkeley used a set of four games in which players were rewarded by generous behavior towards each other, measured by how many dollars or points they shared. 51 volunteers were attached to heart rate monitors - when they saw one player cheating their heart rates increased. They then had the opportunity to warn the honest player that their opponent was cheating, by way of the gossip notes. As the note was passed their heart rates dropped.

The second experiment had 111 participants answer questionnaires about their level of altruism and cooperativeness. They then went to watch the economic trust game - the more sociable observers reported feeling more frustrated by the cheating.

Matthew Feinberg, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and lead author of the paper said :

"A central reason for engaging in gossip was to help others out - more so than just to talk trash about the selfish individual ... Also, the higher participants scored on being altruistic, the more likely they were to experience negative emotions after witnessing the selfish behavior and the more likely they were to engage in the gossip."

The third test raised the stakes and had participants use a portion of their pay from being involved in the experiments to cover the "cost" of the warning notes. Although they could not affect the outcome of the game, they still wanted to send the gossip.

The final test was done with 300 online volunteers drafted from Craig's List, who played a similar version of the economic trust game over the internet. They played using raffle tickets that could be collected in the game, the more tickets a person had, the more chance to win a $50 prize. The players were told that observers could pass messages about their honesty during breaks in the game, and virtually all the players, even those answering the questionnaire as being less altruistic, behaved better.

As Willer says, the results from all four experiments show that:

"When we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated ... But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better."

Other coauthors of the paper are UC Berkeley psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Stellar.

Written by Rupert Shepherd
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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