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RESEARCHERS

The Science of Gossip: Why Everyone Does It and Most of It Is Harmless

3 the researchers behind it — If you dread what your friend group says when you leave the room, the actual data on gossip is worth knowing. Researchers who recorded people's real c

University of Oxford

Robin Dunbar

Known for:The cognitive and time constraints on human social networks, and how friendships decay without active maintenance

Key findings

  1. 2011

    Following students for 18 months across the school-to-university transition, friendships that received less contact declined measurably in emotional closeness while kin relationships stayed stable — and decline was buffered by talking together for women and by shared activities for men. ↗

  2. 2018

    Friendship is an extremely costly relationship in time investment: emotional closeness declines when contact frequency drops, so a limited time budget forces trade-offs in who stays in the inner layers of a person's network. ↗

University of California, Berkeley (later University of Toronto)

Matthew Feinberg

Known for:Experimental work on prosocial gossip — how sharing reputational information protects others and sustains cooperation

Key findings

  1. 2012

    Observing an antisocial act generates negative affect that compels people to warn a potentially vulnerable person; passing on the warning reduces that distress, and participants with more prosocial orientations were the most motivated to gossip this way — even at personal cost. ↗

  2. 2014

    In groups playing repeated economic games, allowing gossip and the exclusion of free-riders sustained high cooperation — and ostracized individuals returned cooperating at levels comparable to everyone else, indicating gossip-based exclusion reformed rather than merely punished. ↗

University of California, Riverside

Megan L. Robbins

Known for:Naturalistic observation of everyday speech with the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), including the largest field study of who gossips and how

Key findings

  1. 2019

    Across five naturalistic studies (467 participants wearing portable recorders), gossip — talk about absent people — averaged about 52 minutes a day, and about 75% of the 4,003 recorded instances were neutral in tone, versus roughly 15% negative and 10% positive. ↗

  2. 2019

    Extraverts gossiped more than introverts; women did more neutral, information-sharing gossip than men but showed no evidence of more negative gossip; and younger people gossiped more negatively than older adults — undercutting the gendered stereotype of the malicious gossip. ↗

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