Article summary of Gossip as cultural learning by Baumeister et. al. - Chapter

What is this article about?

Our modern world is a complex one. Very good things, but also very bad things can happen. Usually, it cannot be foreseen what will happen and therefore, people might experience problems. There are a couple of things that may make coping with experiences better. One of these things is to learn about the adventures and problems of other people. This is done by gossiping. Gossiping is usually not seen as something positive. People see it as a light form of aggression and as a form of bullying. A lot of psychologists think that people gossip because they want to harm somebody. The researchers of this paper, however, argue that gossiping could also have other goals. So, it might be that deformation of the target’s character is not the primary goal of gossip. It could also possible be that the gossiping has another goal.

Recently, some psychologists argued that gossip is a form of social communication which creates a bond between people. If this is true, then gossiping may have two different functions. The first function is that the bond between the one who tells the gossip and the one who hears it, is strengthened because they spend time, they communicate together and share information. The second function is that gossiping relays information about the speaker to the listener. This can be useful for the relationship between the listener and the speakers. The authors of this article agree with this, but additionally, they believe that gossiping can teach people about culture and society. They state that gossiping is a form of observational learning of a cultural kind. It helps us to hear what mistakes people have made, because then we will be less likely to make the same mistakes. According to the authors of this article, gossiping is a powerful way of transmitting information about norms and rules in a certain culture. This does not mean, however, that every person that engages in gossiping does this to transmit information about culture.

Negative gossiping will probably be more powerful than positive gossip. People are more interested in hearing bad news about other than good news, and they are also more interested in telling bad news about other than good news. The other reason why bad news is more informative than good news is that stories about norm violation are more informative than stories about norm confirmation. From an evolutionary point of view, it is more important to learn about dangers than about personalities. Also, people like gossiping the most about people who hold the same position in social structure (same gender and age). Some researchers see gossiping as a way of providing information to others because gossiping is almost never challenged. Usually, people tell others something and these listeners don’t really challenge this information. Another reason why gossiping is seen as a way of transmitting cultural information is that the listeners can also give their input. So, listeners comment and share their opinions with the speaker. The reason behind gossiping, according to the authors, is to pass on information to help someone or gaining status by showing that you understand social norms.

What experiment was used?

The authors of this article wanted to determine if their thoughts on gossiping were correct. So, is gossip really a way to pass on cultural information? In this study, participants were asked to fill in the most interesting piece of gossip they had heard in the last week, the last month and the last year. The second questionnaire included questions about the gossips that were told in the first part. The participants had to answer why the persons told you the gossip, who the target was from the gossip, whether they had told other people about the gossip, how many people were told about it, how they felt when they heard it, whether the gossip reflected badly on the target and why this was the case, whether they learned something from the gossip that they could use in their own life and whether the gossip was important to the participant (rated on a 10-point scale).

Most of the gossip were about somebody the participant knew, but were not related to (84%). 1% was about family members and the other 15% was about people the participant didn’t know personally. So, it seems that most gossip is about people that the participant knew. However, the authors suggest that this is not sufficient to conclude that the goal of gossiping is to transmit information about others. Instead, the authors think that by talking about somebody that is known to the listeners, adds more power to the story. The listener will maybe remember things better and listen more carefully if the story is about somebody he or she knows.

Most of the gossip (55%) was passed on to others and the average amount of people who it had been passed on was 2-3 others. Most people showed emotional reactions to the gossip and according to the authors this shows motivational significance. Negative emotion was the most common (51%), followed by both positive and negative emotions (26%), only positive emotions (15%) and surprise (4%). Emotion helps with adapting to life events by causing people to think about recent events and learn lessons from these events. Especially negative emotions cause counterfactual thinking. There seems to be a link between negative emotions when hearing the gossip and whether somebody reported to have learned anything from the gossip. The more negative emotions were reported, the more likely participants would say they had learned from the gossip. Negative emotion was not linked to whether the gossip reflected badly on the target. So gossip doesn’t seem to really only promote information about the target. The lessons the participants learned were usually useful general lessons (93%) and a couple were lessons about a certain person (7%). Gossip thus seems to provide people with information about living effectively in the society according to norms.