Exchange of social information and gossip was crucial to our Stone Age ancestors' survival.

Gossip identified whom to trust in life-or-death challenges of the ancient world.

Gossip strengthens bonds, enhances social learning, and shows how best to inform and persuade.

It was his first day on the job, and Rod was anxious at the staff meeting where his boss was about to introduce him. His gaze flitted around the conference room from one unfamiliar face to the next, trying to sense who looked trustworthy and who didn't, not that it would be that obvious. Rod had needed to leave his last job because of malicious gossip about his personal life, based upon the smallest grain of truth, that a kind-looking colleague he thought he could trust had spread.

Continuing to survey his new coworkers, it occurred to Rod that the faces around him might be new, but that these people, at their core, were probably the same as at his last job: a screeching echo chamber in which distortions and half-truths could destroy him. Or at least compel him to once again seek a new job.

As the meeting started and he mentally rehearsed a few words to introduce himself, he took in the room one last time, hoping against hope that this new group would be different, wondering, Just how much do these folks gossip?

How much do we gossip?

Rod was right that people are pretty much the same everywhere, and he could expect to be gossiped about. But exactly what percentage of our conversations are devoted to gossip?

If you’re like most people, you don’t like to think of yourself as a gossip, so your estimate of the percentage of your own conversations devoted to gossip is probably in the single-digit range, if not zero.

Yet research on casual conversations[1] reveals that more than 60 percent of informal conversations are gossip or the exchange of related “social information.” Dunbar[1] defines exchange of social information as conversations about people and relationships (e.g., who’s related to whom, who’s allied with whom, who’s married to whom), whereas a more narrowly defined subset of social conversations constitutes pure gossip, containing an element of judgment or evaluation of a not-present third party. Under this narrower definition, about 15 percent of conversations, on average, are given over to gossip.[2]

Which means, depending upon how broadly you define gossip, almost all of us are gossips. Yes, all of us. Meta-analysis from multiple studies shows that, stereotypes to the contrary, women do not gossip more than men.[3]

Why gossip dominates our conversations

Humans are a social species that thrives today because of intraspecies cooperation. But for our distant ancestors, social relationships did more than help them thrive; relationships were essential to their very survival. Without group protection from predators and rival clans, and lacking the sharing of resources with others, social outcasts had a high chance of perishing. Outcasts also were unlikely to reproduce and pass their antisocial tendencies to their progeny.[3,4]

But how did outcasts become outcasts in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, and how did those more fortunate remain in the good graces of the group?

According to evolutionary psychologists, early humans, like all social species, exercised implicit social contracts where group members were expected to give as much as they got.[5] Cheaters who cynically exploited others or laggards who did not pull their weight were expelled.

And people discovered who fulfilled and violated solemn social contracts through conversations about other people, their relationships, their behaviors, and, especially, about their reputations.

So, you exist today, in part, because ancient gossip about your ancient ancestors was either positive or neutral enough to preserve their membership in a group. Also, your ancestors' chances of survival increased through gossip about whom to trust and distrust

Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists assert that gossip has historically played other key roles in all-important social dynamics of our ancestors, including:

Increasing social cohesion. Dunbar argues that gossip in humans serves the same function as grooming in other primates, providing mutual soothing and relationship strengthening.[1]

Teaching group norms. Gossip, especially the judgmental kind, communicated and propagated both explicit and implicit “rules” of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.[2-5]

Identifying coalitions and cliques of members with similar beliefs and attitudes.[2-5]

In general, fostering and promoting reciprocal altruism beyond family boundaries, to the benefit of the larger group.[2-5]

Is gossip still important?

The short answer is "No," if you define important as determining life-or-death outcomes, at least for those of us in developed countries who do not face a daily struggle for survival. In affluent modern societies, earning a bad reputation spread through gossip may get you fired or break up your marriage, but it’s unlikely to get you killed.

From this perspective, our current affinity for gossip is a mismatch with modern life in developed societies, where, with a few exceptions (e.g., crime and warfare), reputation does not have life-or-death consequences. Perhaps that’s why gossip in the modern era has gotten a bad reputation.

But gossip, and more crucially, the powerful anthropological forces driving it, are vitally important to your success and happiness in today’s world, for multiple reasons. Here are a few.

Even though the survival value of gossip has greatly diminished, friends, family, and co-workers—whose brains are still running Stone Age scripts—gossip about you. And, as with other information exchanges, such gossip will give disproportionate attention and weight to negative information about you.[7] Researchers on information bias assert that people are more likely to believe negative vs. positive information about your reputation, because, in perilous prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, failure to heed negative information—such as a person’s unreliability or dishonesty—could have fatal consequences. In contrast, failure to heed positive information about a person might lead to a lost opportunity, but not death.[6,7] So, if you find yourself being treated unfairly, distorted, derogatory gossip may be the reason. Being forewarned about this unfortunate mismatch between the ancient and modern worlds is to be forearmed.

Even more compelling reasons to pay close attention to the psychology of gossip come from the underlying reasons that gossip is so pervasive: Evolution wired our brains to pay exquisite attention to other people’s facial expressions, body language, relationships, behaviors, and reputations.[1] To bring this home to you, stop for a moment and consider what you think and care about most and what elicits the overwhelming majority of your strongest emotions: family, friends, co-workers, and, occasionally, a politician or two. In other words, other humans.

People are hard-wired to care, above all else, about other people. Which means that, whenever you want to inform or persuade others—at work or in your personal life—don’t rely on facts and logic: Frame the information as stories about people. To learn how to do this, pick up any magazine or newspaper (or go to any news site) and observe how most feature stories begin: with the compelling story of a single person affected by the events being reported.

If we’ve learned anything from the “post-truth,” highly polarized information sphere in which we find ourselves, it’s that there are no such things as immutable facts or logic arguments to inform and persuade others. But thanks to the long hand of evolution, there remains one universal way to reach others: by starting important conversations by talking about people.

In other words, by gossiping.

1. Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective, https://allegatifac.unipv.it/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf

2. Reputation, Gossip, and Human Cooperation, https://amsterdamcooperationlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/wu-balli…

3. Who Gossips and How in Everyday Life?, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550619837000

4. Networks of reliable reputations and cooperation: a review, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8487750/

5. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-39894-001

6. The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signaling, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8487738/

7. Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533

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