The secrets of gossip, revealed: Americans spend 52 minutes a day talking about other people and men do it just as much as women, study finds
- Gossip gets a bad rap, but scientists see it as a necessity to how society works
- Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, outfitted 467 people with listening devices to eaves drop on several days of their conversations
- They found that we spend almost an hour a day gossiping on average
- Women do it more, but only to exchange ‘neutral’ information about other people, rather than to make negative quips
To gossip might not be considered ‘moral,’ but it’s certainly human – and a new study suggests it’s more common and less nasty than you might think.
In fact, sociologists see gossip as part of the glue of societies, helping spread information through groups, create a united front and protect people from potential bad actors.
For the first time, however, researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside), have tracked just how much we gossip and who is saying what.
Their fitting study design let the researchers eavesdrop on study participants’ conversations – for science – and revealed that we spend nearly an hour of each day on average gossiping, and no one is above it.
The titular Mean Girls from the film have ‘big hair’ because it’s ‘full of secrets,’ as one character says. But so do the rest of us, according to new research that debunks the myth that women spend more time on negative gossip than men do
A stereotype of a ‘gossip’ would perhaps look something like the titular characters from Mean Girls, whose ‘hair is so big [because] it’s full of secrets,’ as another character quips.
The film’s heroine, Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan, is set up as their opposite: the down-to-earth new girl who’s just landed from Africa with bright eyes and a do-gooder spirit.
But she’s quickly caught up in the gossip, rumor mill and queen bee contest. It doesn’t take long before she’s not so different from the queen bee, Regina; in fact, she effectively becomes her.
The film end’s with a happy resolution and message about equality, but along the way there’s another: none of us is as above gossip as we think.
Researchers at UC Riverside upended some traditional assumptions about gossip in their new study, published this week in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
They did so by fitting 467 (willing) participants with a listening device that randomly sampled snatches of their conversations throughout the day, capturing and recording about 10 percent of what they said.
Among the 269 women and 198, they heard 4,003 instances of gossip over the course of two to five days.
That came out to an average of 52 minutes a day spent on gossip.
Everyone did it, but not everyone did it the same way.
The vast majority of gossip was about people the participants knew, rather than celebrities.
Women did spend slightly more time on gossip than men – but only say things that the researchers categorized as ‘neutral,’ meaning they shared information, rather than making negative statements or judgments.
Neutral gossip was the dominant form, but there was twice as much trash talking as there was praise in the instances of gossip the study analyzed.
Young people were particularly prone to making negative comments, but the reputation of richer people as less gossip-happy doesn’t hold water, according to the new study.
It found that poorer or less educated people gossip no more than do wealthy or well-educated people.
We all gossip, and it’s part of the fabric of human nature and curiosity, and it even serves an important purpose.
Previous research has shown that the way we see and how our brain perceives faces visually actually changes according to gossip we hear, and it has a protective effect, providing information about who is trustworthy and who might pose a danger to us.
In other words, we are biologically programmed to respond to and use gossip.
Moreover, ‘gossip is ubiquitous,’ the study authors write, unequivocally.