- The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices.
- Hearing gossip about people can change the way you see them — literally.
- Negative gossip actually alters the way our visual system responds to a particular face, according to a study .
- The findings suggest that the human brain is wired to respond to gossip, researchers say. And it adds to the evidence that gossip helped early humans get ahead.
- Gossip is helping you to predict who is friend and who is foe.
- The team that has been studying how gossip affects not just what we know about a familiar / unfamiliar person but how we feel about them. The team has shown that getting secondhand information about a person can have a powerful effect.
- That may seem like a strange thing to ask. But it makes sense when you consider that the human brain has a whole lot of connections between regions that process visual information and areas involved in our most basic emotions.
- So the researchers team brought in volunteers and had them look at faces paired with gossip. Some of these faces were associated with negative gossip, such as “threw a chair at his classmate.” Other faces were associated with more positive actions, such as “helped an elderly woman with her groceries.”
Small tongues gossip and large ears magnify
- Then the researchers looked to see how the volunteers’ brains responded to the different kinds of information. They did this by showing the left and right eyes of each person very different images. So one eye might see a face, while the other eye would see a house.
- These very different images cause something called binocular rivalry. The human brain can only handle one of the images at a time. So it unconsciously tends to linger on the one it considers more important.
- And the researcher found that volunteers’ brains were most likely to fix on faces associated with negative gossip.
- Gossip doesn’t just influence your opinions about people, it actually influences how you see them visually.
- The finding suggests we are hardwired to pay more attention to a person if we’ve been told they are dangerous or dishonest or unpleasant.
- Other scientists say that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
- For years, researchers have been saying that our intense interest in gossip is not really a character flaw. It’s part of who we are. It’s almost a biological event, and it exists for good evolutionary reasons.
- Even when primitive humans lived in small groups, they needed to know things like who might be a threat and who was after a particular mate. And learning those things through personal experience would have been slow and potentially dangerous.
- So one shortcut would have been gossip.
- People who had an intense interest in that — that constantly were monitoring who’s sleeping with who and who’s friends with whom and who you can trust and who you can’t — came out ahead. People who just didn’t care about that stuff got left behind.
- And it makes sense that our brains pay special attention to negative gossip.
- If somebody is a competitor or somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dirt about them.
- You want negative information, because that’s the stuff you can exploit to get ahead.
- Unfortunately the people who gossip are scared to face reality. They prefer to live in illusions rather than taste the fruit of truth.
If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.