Gossiping was more about celebrities and ingroup members (over strangers); more about negative events overall, and yet for ingroup members, more positive gossiping; for content, more about moral topics

How ‘who someone is’ and ‘what they did’ influences gossiping about them. Jeungmin Lee, Jerald D. Kralik, Jaehyung Kwon, Jaeseung Jeong. PLoS, July 6, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269812

Abstract: To understand, predict, and help correct each other’s actions we need to maintain accurate, up-to-date knowledge of people, and communication is a critical means by which we gather and disseminate this information. Yet the conditions under which we communication social information remain unclear. Testing hypotheses generated from our theoretical framework, we examined when and why social information is disseminated about an absent third party: i.e., gossiped. Gossip scenarios presented to participants (e.g., “Person-X cheated on their exam”) were based on three key factors: (1) target (ingroup, outgroup, or celebrity), (2) valence (positive or negative), and (3) content. We then asked them (a) whether they would spread the information, and (b) to rate it according to subjective valence, ordinariness, interest level, and emotion. For ratings, the scenarios participants chose to gossip were considered to have higher valence (whether positive or negative), to be rarer, more interesting, and more emotionally evocative; thus showing that the paradigm was meaningful to subjects. Indeed, for target, valence, and content, a repeated-measures ANOVA found significant effects for each factor independently, as well as their interactions. The results supported our hypotheses: e.g., for target, more gossiping about celebrities and ingroup members (over strangers); for valence, more about negative events overall, and yet for ingroup members, more positive gossiping; for content, more about moral topics, with yet all domains of social content communicated depending on the situation—context matters, influencing needs. The findings suggest that social knowledge sharing (i.e., gossip) involves sophisticated calculations that require our highest sociocognitive abilities, and provide specific hypotheses for future examination of neural mechanisms.

Discussion

In this study we sought to test the extent to which gossiping behavior could be understood using a model of social information communication [72, 73]. This model is not unlike others, investigating the fundamental motives behind gossip behaviors [e.g., 20, 24, 26, 28]; however, our model extends the existing ones, providing a more comprehensive sociocognitive-neuroeconomic account of social information communication that more closely models the human mind/brain, allowing us to understand and explain the findings under one consistent and detailed framework. To test the six model predictions, we first asked participants to read various gossip scenarios (e.g., Person-X cheated on the final exam), and then asked whether they would gossip this information to others. The scenarios varied the target person that the gossip is about (ingroup, celebrities, or outgroup), valence (whether positive or negative), and content (eight different domains).

Main findings

The target main effect (celebrities > ingroup >> outgroup) provides evidence for interest more generally [4, 9, 14–19], and relationship intimacy [2, 23, 34, 49–53] and social influence [24, 25, 27, 35–48] more specifically as important factors driving people to gossip. Since intimacy or closeness implies having more meaning and influence in an individual’s day-to-day life, and influence or status implies social attention, power, and influence, both factors support the notion that functional significance strongly drives gossiping.

For valence, we found negative events to be spread more than positive ones. Indeed, the functional role of negative gossiping–e.g., to punish the target, protect receivers, and potentially promote oneself [24, 25, 27, 35–48, 83, 90, 96]–appeared prominent and clear, especially given that we did not find evidence for negative gossiping being based simply on its intrigue or entertainment value (with ratings for ‘rarity’ comparable to positive scenarios and lower than positive scenarios for ‘interest level’).

Although, overall, negative valence promoted gossiping more than positively valenced scenarios, a persistent finding across the study nevertheless was that positively valenced scenarios perhaps rather surprisingly promoted gossip to a large degree: overall (i.e., not greatly lower than negative: 48.41% spreading for positive vs. 50.76% for negative), being higher than negative spreading for ingroup (target x valence), and being comparable to or even higher than negative spreading for specific content dimensions, even for celebrities and outgroup [61]. For example, the positive gossiping rate was especially high for care, fairness, and altruism for all target groups, indicating that these positive acts resonate perhaps universally: such kindness and regard for others permeates the social network. Our results (including the ratings scores for subjective valence, interest and emotion) thus join the others that have found positive events to also strongly drive gossip [8, 32, 57, 59–61]. Moreover, given that this occurred with all content domains (i.e., all showed significant positive gossiping), the results suggest that along with correction and ‘punishment’, positive feedback and information sharing comparably influence social behavior–not only for motives such as social bonding, but also for social control via strengthening and promoting it [26]. This is especially suggested given the high rates of positive gossiping across the moral domains. Indeed, rather surprisingly, we even found prosociality to produce more positive (care) than negative (harm) gossiping.

The results for content overall supported our hypothesis that, in general, moral dimensions would be spread most, and in particular, that prosociality (care/harm) and fairness (fairness/cheating) would be most spread. These align with previous findings that highlight the functional significance of gossip as it relates to cooperation, competition, and other moral dimensions, and we extend the findings to further dimensions of morality [25, 35–42, 64–66, 68]. Thus, almost diametrically opposed to the presumed trivial nature of gossip, we found the most impactful moral dimensions to be most spread, attesting to the importance of gossip on the regulation of societal members and the influence on future social interactions.

At the same time, scenarios representing all of the moral domains (and all content domains for that matter) were significantly spread at various rates, indicating the need to study these various domains and their differences more closely, with dominant paradigms that have focused on cooperation and competition, for example, useful in their own right, but not well representing other important social dimensions. For instance, the results for purity were particularly interesting, revealing that, on the one hand, the dimension appears to be universally meaningful (here: across all target groups), and yet, on the other hand, treated exceptionally, at least for perhaps particular targets (here: ingroup) and cultures (here: Korean). Indeed, gossip spreading about targets’ norm violation has been shown to depend on cultural context [63, 69]. Future research is therefore needed to clarify how and why individuals and societies respond the way they do to cases involving purity (e.g., gossiping vs. other means of communication, or perhaps even suppression)–and, in fact, for all individual dimensions of social interaction (i.e., moral and others). To be sure, our findings also point again to the significance of the relationships and interdependencies among the gossip parties themselves (i.e., gossiper-receiver, gossiper-target, and receiver-target) [20]. Moreover, we believe these questions are particularly ripe for additional modeling [97–100] and neural imaging studies [101–103] to help clarify the factors, their relationships, and the underlying mechanisms that drive the sociocognitive-neuroeconomic decisions involving social interaction and communication.

In addition to moral dimensions, we nonetheless also found that other types of knowledge may be highly valued under various circumstances; in other words, context is critical: for example, with more personal and day-to-day sociality (i.e., general social affairs and social-oriented) being more important with ingroup targets. Because this more seemingly mundane social information was differentially important for ingroup members, it suggests that its significance derives from the desire to be updated about the basic activities of those close to you [28]. From a sociocognitive perspective, it implies the need to maintain accurate knowledge of them: i.e., an accurate model of their minds, including their current knowledge, interests, intentions, activities, etc. [5, 72, 73, 92, 93]. Moreover, in doing this, a sense of solidarity and feelings of community among ingroup members also develops [23, 34, 46, 49–53].

A dominant finding in the two-way (target x valence) and three-way (content x valence x target) interactions was that spreading information about ingroup targets skewed positive, suggesting either that positive events were more meaningful and thus being spread more for ingroup targets [83, 90], or spreading negative information about them might be costlier [20]–and we found evidence for both–especially the latter. That is, for spreading negative information about ingroup members, the overall results suggest a general negativity-avoidance effect for ingroup targets. This result is in line with previous findings that people perceive a gossiper who shares favorable and therefore positive information about others more positively, which should be especially important among ingroup members [65, 104–107].

Multiple factors likely dampen negative gossiping of ingroup members, including potential repercussions, other means to communicate to the target, and perhaps more leeway with and empathy toward equal and equivalently lower status individuals [20, 21, 49, 108, 109]. Further empirical and computational research can help to delineate the potential influence of such factors on negative gossiping about ingroup members (including both the ‘ceiling’ and ‘floor’ components). In any case, this avoidance of negativity with ingroup members provides evidence for our predictions (Hypothesis 4b), and more specifically, that the net effect of the overall expected outcome influences the gossiper’s decision to gossip [20, 57].

Another dominant finding was that spreading information about celebrities generally skewed negative. This overall effect is likely at least partially due to the lowered risk of repercussions to the gossiper; but the evidence further suggests that the social status of celebrities is a major driving factor underlying the heightened negative gossiping, with the intention of lowering that of the celebrity (and thereby raising the gossiper’s own status, and perhaps the receivers’ as well), at least among those within the gossiper’s purview. This finding thus supports others showing that in an environment where vertical hierarchy exists, people with low status tend to gossip about high-status individuals with more power [28, 49]. Gossiping negatively about people with power (especially about moral contents) has been called a weapons-of-the-weak mechanism [110] or subordinate strategy [see 111] whereby low-status, relatively powerless individuals use gossip as a weapon to pressure more privileged individuals [26]. An examination of the results for the specific content domains further showed that for higher-status individuals (celebrities), loyalty and humility warrants action (i.e., gossiping), as do cases of trying to beat others in underhanded ways or otherwise cheating the system [83].

In contrast, the greater interest in altruism (over selfishness) and fairness (over cheating) for both ingroup and outgroup targets suggests that such selfless and fair acts are especially impressive when conducted by those of lesser status and means. Moreover, authority and positive competition with ingroup targets appear to generate action (receiving higher gossiping rates), suggesting that these topics are more relevant among relatively lower (compared to celebrities) and more equal status ingroup members, with positive competition suggesting scenarios of ambition or achievement resonate more. At the same time, selfish behavior of ingroup and outgroup people are relatively less spread, with such acts appearing to be more tolerated in those with less means and status. In sum, our results support our hypotheses and others findings that status is a major factor determining the extent of and types of gossip [28, 49]. Further empirical and computational work can extend our findings by delineating exactly how status interacts with other factors to promote social interactions, such as with social information spreading [e.g., 112]. In any case, the evidence for status considerations again attests to the importance of functional value driving gossiping behavior.

For outgroup targets, we generally found a relative lack of interest, with many results significantly weaker compared to ingroup and celebrities, and thus supporting our hypotheses (especially Hypothesis 1). Even this result may be a bit surprising if one generally construes the “outgroup” as outsiders, and thus potential threats, enemies, etc. However, comparable to the findings of others, we found that the usual use of the “outgroup” concept requires a more nuanced appreciation [113]. Those considered as viable threats likely evoke sufficient interest that warrants action, rather than generally being ignored. Yet it is also unfortunately probable that a relative lack of empathy can be seen with strangers in general, making it more difficult to care sufficiently in their affairs [114, 115].

At the same time, however, even for outgroup members (i.e., complete strangers), some content domains were generally important in our study, including a heightened rate of information spreading for both care and harm (i.e., the prosociality domain), fair and cheating (i.e., the fairness domain), and altruism and selfishness (i.e., the social-oriented domain). This heightened spreading for all three target groups indicates a strong interest in prosociality, fairness, and social-orientation that is worthy of disseminating to others regardless of the actor involved–i.e., prominent universals for all members of society. These results are in line with others that show that stories of strangers can also elicit interest and therefore produce gossip if the events can offer useful life lessons and strategies [4, 28].

Study limitations

There are some study limitations that should be considered. First, we did not test our hypotheses in a more natural context where gossip triads are interacting freely in spontaneous situations. The clear advantage of field studies using various methods such as eavesdropping [6, 8, 116], daily diary surveys [117], and experience sampling methods [59] is that a potentially rich set of observational data that reflects real-life gossiping behavior can be collected [see 59, 96]. And there are indeed cases where behavior observed in the laboratory may not appear outside it [118, 119], requiring all laboratory studies to consider the ecological validity. Here, we took several steps to minimize the gap between the natural and laboratory settings. First, we note that much of the information people learn about others (including ingroup members) these days comes from texts read on electronic devices (phones, computers). Second, prior to the experiment we asked participants to submit the names of their closest friends (i.e., ingroup) so that the ingroup scenarios would feel like actually receiving information about them. We also chose well-known Korean celebrities, and used foreign names as strangers for the outgroup. Third, we also gave participants thorough instruction to assume that every piece of information provided during the task is real; and we received several comments during the post-experiment verbal interview directly stating that the scenarios felt realistic, even being “shocked” by some of the extreme cases (e.g., with harm or degradation contents). Fourth, and importantly, our experiment was also designed to address ecological validity directly by asking participants to rate each scenario according to subjective valence, ordinariness, interest level, and emotion (after they chose whether to gossip or not). The scenarios participants chose to gossip were considered to have higher valence (whether positive or negative), to be rarer, more interesting, and more emotionally evocative—thus showing that they were meaningful to the participants. Fifth, and finally, the fact that many of our results match those of other studies helps to support the validity of our experimental paradigm.

Indeed, experimental paradigms such as ours help complement others by enabling clearer and more precise testing of relevant factors. Nonetheless, it is clear that future research is needed to further validate our findings, not only with methodologies described above, but others as well, such as curating and examining natural interactions on social media (such as Facebook or Twitter).

A second limitation is that the behavioral-based study is nevertheless limited in the precision it can achieve, not enabling tests of more detailed processes in our theoretical framework. Future research can hopefully utilize our framework and test paradigm to examine, for example, the neural processes underlying the gossip decision (such as the benefits vs. costs computations in the brain that drive gossiping). A few studies have investigated neural activity during gossip [101–103], but many unknown factors remain. Third, it is clear that many more factors remain to be examined, such as how the choice of receiver influences the gossip decision, as the possible gossiper may keep quiet [20] or selectively expose the target information [49, 120] depending on the receiver’s identity. Other factors include more specific detail about the target and event content, especially to better characterize the more nuanced context effects.