Pssst! Heard the Latest About Gossiping? Can You Believe It?

A neighbor regularly leaves telephone messages that go something like this: “Hi. Call me. I got some good gossip.”

It’s small-time gossip, like so-and-so’s baby-sitter is about to quit, who is pregnant, and the latest incident with the kid (a.k.a. Satan) who regularly pummels and pinches his mother while she talks to grown-ups.

The neighborhood grapevine is nothing like the gossip I get from newspapers, tabloids and TV gossip mongers: Chelsea Clinton has a new boyfriend. Monica Lewinsky sightings: her latest hairstyle, favorite place to shop, and where she last conferred with her lawyer over lunch.

But gossiping, whether passed at the office water cooler, by e-mail, face to face over cafe lattes or culled from newspapers and magazines, is a basic human instinct we need not feel sheepish about, despite prevailing social disapproval. The importance of gossiping to a social species like ours has been profoundly underestimated, social scientists say.

Gossiping--which includes saying good things behind people’s backs--is an essential bonding ritual for dynamic and diverse social groups. It forges common ground, allows us to gauge opinions without disclosing ours, provides a navigating map of social relationships and lays out power structures. Gossip also provides a moral yardstick, a way to measure our own behavior against what is socially appropriate and inappropriate. Besides all that, gossip is entertaining.

“You gossip with someone to establish a relationship and so you are almost exchanging a commodity: I give you something, you give me something back,” says Ralph Rosnow, a professor of psychology at Temple University and expert on gossip. “The second thing is almost Machiavellian. You are telling someone something to influence their behavior. The third thing is getting information. It is a way to find out what is permissible in a social group.”

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So ubiquitous is gossiping that the phenomenon is hard to study. “You can’t ask people about it directly because they are not aware of doing it,” says Rosnow. Still, attempts have been made to quantify gossip using trained eavesdroppers. In a study of 200 college students at Boston’s Northeastern University, eavesdroppers listened for four hours a day for 40 days and found that about two-thirds of the students’ talk was devoted to gossip. An English study conducted by Robin Dunbar, professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool and author of “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language” (Harvard University Press, 1997), got the same results by eavesdropping up and down England.

We most often think of gossip as salacious tales of misbehavior, but researchers argue that not all gossip is spreading the dirt. “Gossip has a bad reputation,” says Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern and author of “Gossip: The Inside Scoop” (Plenum Press, 1987). “It is thought of as scandalous, pejorative small talk.”

But, according to Levin’s study of the Northeastern students, 33% of the gossip was flattery, 33% was negative and the rest was mixed. Dunbar’s study in England found only 5% of gossip qualified as negative.

Teens gossip an average of 18 times an hour, according to a study conducted by Jeffrey G. Parker, an assistant psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University. He had researchers listen in on 53 pairs of bunk mates at a summer camp. They found that 25% of the teens’ gossip qualified as character defamation; 10% expressed admiration. Boys and girls spent equal amounts of time gossiping.

“Gossip is a way to power and popularity,” says Parker. “Kids at the hub of social networks know a lot of what is going on. It serves as a marker of your status in the hierarchy.”

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Despite idioms such as “gossiping like a bunch of old hens,” men gossip as much as their female counterparts, say researchers. It goes by male jargon: “shooting the breeze,” “locker room talk” and “shop talk.” The subjects differ, however.

“When we looked at the targets of gossip, women tend to gossip about people they know very well--dates, friends, roommates and family members,” says Levin. “Men tend to gossip about sports figures, political figures, acquaintances and people they didn’t even know. We found that men were just as likely to say nasty things about others as women.”

Despite our moralizing against gossip, folks who don’t gossip at all are not winning popularity contests. “What we found is, people don’t make friends with people who don’t gossip at all,” says Anne A. Skledar, chairwoman of the psychology department at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa., who, with colleagues, conducted a 1993 study of sorority gossip. “They are not seen as woven into the fabric of the group and they are not seen as interesting either. We think of them as unwilling to share secrets.”

The least risky gossip target is a celebrity, public figure or politician, which in part explains the popularity of tabloid newspapers and TV and news programs peddling gossip as a weapon in the ratings wars. “The explosion of gossip in the media is how we share as a community because our face-to-face community is mobile and shifting,” says anthropologist Elizabeth Bird, author of “For Enquiring Minds: A Culture of Supermarket Tabloids” (University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

“These are people we know about,” she says. “Anybody can talk about Clinton or the Amy Fisher story. The Clinton and Lewinsky story was about moral boundaries. It makes your life seem more ordered by comparison.”