Why gossip is harmful

People use gossip for their own selfish interests at the expense of others. Subtle social cues can turn to hostility or manipulation and quickly trigger anger, shame, and resentment.

So, we shouldn't think about gossip as just a time-wasting, tacky habit. It can actually be a valuable social tool to help us understand and get along better with those around us. But why in the world do we gossip about people who aren't around us, people we've never even met?

Part of our fascination may be hardwired in our minds. Our brains have a special compartment for remembering human faces. And while our ancestors may have had to recognize friends from foes, the number of faces they encountered was limited.

We, on the other hand, are inundated with faces, not just through our own personal interactions - but in magazines, on television, and online. We see the faces of celebrities, starlets, and politicians so frequently.

Some of them we see more often than we see our own friends and family members. We can begin to feel an intimacy with them, and this familiarity makes it trickier for us to distinguish the faces we know personally from the ones we know peripherally. Our mind thinks that since we see these faces so often and know so much information about them, they must be socially important to use.

Celebrities can feel like our friends. But these "pseudo-relationships" can be a good thing. Mental Health Gossip: good or bad? Gossip: good or bad? The overgrowth of the grapevine Gossip hasn't always been considered a bad word. Why do we gossip? As with our ancestors, gossip can be quite helpful and instructive: It helps us bond with our friends. The act of gossiping - talking, listening, sharing secrets and stories - bonds us together and helps us to form friendships and distinctive group identities.

Though women more often earn the "gossip" label, both genders take part in the habit with equal gusto. The study conducted by McAndrew showed that we're all keen to hear and pass along any bad news about our rivals or any good news about our friends. Men are more likely to share gossip only with their romantic partners, while women will whisper with their lovers and their friends alike.

Both men and women seem to prefer talking about and hearing about people of their own gender. It teaches us lessons. You find out someone in your company is not a team player and you let other coworkers know so that they can try to avoid working with that colleague.

A bad gossiper, on the other hand, is someone who shares information about others in order to get ahead or get an advantage themselves, or just plain recklessly. And research has indeed shown that a lot of gossip has both positive effects and moral motivations, explains Robb Willer , Professor of Sociology and Director of the Polarization and Social Change Laboratory at Stanford University, who studies the social forces that bring us together and drive us against one another, including gossip.

Studies from his group have shown that the more generous and moral among us are most likely to pass along rumors about untrustworthy people, and they report doing so because they are concerned about helping others. Work from his group has also found that engaging in gossip can actually temper some of our frustrations and other negative emotions we feel when we find out someone has behaved in a deviant way.

A coworker unfairly gets a promotion. And his team has found that gossip is actually one of the forces that promotes cooperation among groups, too. Experiments his team have done suggest that the threat of being gossiped about deters untrustworthy behavior; once people have been gossiped about for behaving in an untrustworthy way, they tend to reform their behavior; and gossip helps people know who to avoid and not trust.

Together the evidence suggests that gossip may play an important role in maintaining social order, Willer says. Hurt feelings and reputations. Attrition due to good employees leaving the company because of an unhealthy work environment.

Company Policies In their employee handbooks, many companies have formal policies restricting gossip. Employee Conduct. You have successfully saved this page as a bookmark. OK My Bookmarks. Please confirm that you want to proceed with deleting bookmark. Delete Cancel. You have successfully removed bookmark. Delete canceled. Please log in as a SHRM member before saving bookmarks. OK Proceed. By Sophia Gottfried. Related Stories. These 5 Strategies Could Help.

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