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.
