Gossiping is scientifically proven to be good for us. Here’s why

If you’ve ever been told you have a big mouth, you can officially take that as a compliment – gossip is now scientifically proven to be good for you.

Gossip has been long researched by scientists, sociologists and psychologists, and the field is more thorough than one might expect. Various studies from 2004, 2019, 2020, and now, 2021, have extensively reviewed the impacts of gossip, its various windfalls and pitfalls, and the ways in which it can foster relationships.

You heard it here first: as of 2021, gossip is a way to build trust, not destroy it.

What counts as gossip?

The co-author of another 2021 study, Dr. Eshin Jolly, claims that gossip is “misunderstood” in a media release from Dartmouth College. As a researcher at Dartmouth, he’s been studying the science of gossip all throughout his postdoctoral program.

Jolly notes that gossip can provide “substantive connection beyond its typical negative connotation,” and that it can be “useful,” as it “helps people learn through the experiences of others while enabling them to become closer to each other in the process.”

Other research in the field of gossip, like this 2020 study from the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal, has shown that “approximately 14% of people’s daily conversations are gossip.”

While that might seem like a lot of backtalk, it’s found that these conversations are “primarily neutral in tone,” and that it generally covers “social information,” such as who’s dating who, or who said what, and when.

The 2021 study, in particular, defines gossip as far more than just “baseless trash talk.” In fact, gossip can encompass everything from “social topics involving self-disclosure” to broader discussions about other people, including family, celebrities, peers or bosses.

Gossip was determined by researchers to be a “multi-faceted behavior that reflects multiple social functions;” rather than simply being used as a tool to ostracize one group from another, gossip often “facilitates learning from others when direct observation is not possible,” and can “build social connections and align social impressions and behavior.”

How did the study work?

Gossip was analyzed in this particular study through an online game created by the Dartmouth COSAN Lab. The game, categorized as a “public goods game,” was meant to track the evolution of information as it was passed from person to person by either investing or saving money. In some of the rounds, players could only see a couple of their teammates’ choices and reported their findings to another person in the group via a private chat. When researchers looked at this private chat, it allowed them to observe how the players were gossiping about each other.

StudyFinds reports that the game was structured by players engaging in 10 rounds of the game, each round containing six-person groups. Players had $10 per round and could either invest the money in a group fund, which would be multiplied by 1.5 and divided among the six players or keep the $10 for themselves.

Ultimately, the financial gains of choosing to keep or invest the money was irrelevant – the most important feature of the game is that tension developed between “selfish (freeriding) players” and “cooperative players.”

The less information the players had about each other, the more they’d want to gossip. And when everyone could see what choices everyone else was making, the conversations tended to cover a “wider variety of neutral topics.”

Players who had the opportunity to connect and chat with one another ended up feeling more connected after the game. StudyFinds also reports that though some tension developed around stingy players, ultimately “there was less decline in cooperation when players could privately chat with each other,” and that “overall, communication increased collective cooperation.”

What does this mean for me?

It might be tempting to think of gossip as a catty, negative thing. But gossip can also be thought of as “vicarious learning,” especially when one is using information that they’re gathering about their surroundings to build a more solid social foundation with their coworkers. One can then use gossip to gather information, much like an anthropologist would as they study the culture and surroundings of the groups they’re observing.

In general, gossip can connect one with their coworkers, friends and relatives in a way that doesn’t have to be malicious, involving splitting relationships or building an environment of mistrust. The Current Biology study specifies that as one can pick up certain elements from a conversational partner, such as sayings, viewpoints or reflections, gossip can be used to “form more similar impressions, and build robust social bonds.”

Another way in which this study allows for a more positive view of gossip is that in some ways, it “helps promote cooperation in groups without a need for formal sanctioning mechanisms.”

In contrast to outside forces mandating that a group of people get along with each other, people use gossip to become internally motivated by the notion that if they do something selfish or egocentric, they’ll be judged by the social jury of their peers.