Hmmm. I'm not sure what to think of this. I'm not sure I can fully agree that sharing juicy bits of information about other people's personal lives is a good thing.
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This grapevine branches out through almost every social group and it functions, in part, to keep people from straying too far outside the group's rules, written and unwritten, social scientists find.
In one recent experiment, Dr. Wilson led a team of researchers who asked a group of 195 men and women to rate their approval or disapproval of several situations in which people talked behind the back of a neighbor. In one, a rancher complained to other ranchers that his neighbor had neglected to fix a fence, allowing cattle to wander and freeload. The report was accurate, and the students did not disapprove of the gossip.
But men in particular, the researchers found, strongly objected if the rancher chose to keep mum about the fence incident.
"Plain and simple he should have told about the problem to warn other ranchers," wrote one study participant, expressing a common sentiment that, in this case, a failure to gossip put the group at risk.
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This is the first example they give of positive gossip. I wouldn't consider this gossip at all. Sharing information that has a direct practical effect on another person's business is just doing good business. A broken fence is something a farmer needs to know about.
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This rule-enforcing dynamic is hardly confined to the lab. For 18 months, Kevin Kniffin, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, tracked the social interactions of a university crew team, about 50 men and women who rowed together in groups of four or eight.
Dr. Kniffin said he was still analyzing his research notes. But a preliminary finding, he said, was that gossip levels peaked when the team included a slacker, a young man who regularly missed practices or showed up late. Fellow crew members joked about the slacker's sex life behind his back and made cruel cracks about his character and manhood, in part because the man's shortcoming reflected badly on the entire team.
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So I'm thinking as I read this, criticize the guy for not pulling his weight on the team. Calling him names and being cruel about something that has nothing to do with his ability to row a boat is uncalled for.
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Knowing that your boss is cheating on his wife, or that a sister-in-law has a drinking problem or a rival has benefited from a secret trust fund may be enormously important, and in many cases change a person's behavior for the better.
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Interesting claim, but I fail to see how. How is my behavior going to be improved by knowing any of those things about my colleagues? I can only see bad coming from such knowledge. I might think less of them, which would be unfair if they're not doing a bad job. How could that possibly help me to work with them better?
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"We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy," said Sarah Wert, a psychologist at Yale. "Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal."
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So count me in as one of the unhealthy and abnormal. I don't want to know my colleague's personal dirty laundry. It's absolutely irrelevant in how I realte to them. All I need to know about somebody I'm working with is how well they do thier job, and how that relates to my ability to do my job. Anything else is entirely superfluous.
Being asocial does not in any way prevent me from doing my job well. It just means I don't get invited to parties and social gatherings, which I consider a positive thing, as I don't like parties and social gatherings.
[quote]Talking out of school may also buffer against low-grade depressive moods. In one recent study, Dr. Wert had 84 college students write about a time in their lives when they felt particularly alienated socially, and also about a memory of being warmly accepted.
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Ms. Miraglia, the high school teacher, said that in her previous job she found it especially comforting to hear about more senior teachers' struggle to control difficult students. "It was my first job, and I felt overwhelmed, and to hear someone say, 'There's no control in that class' about another teacher, that helped build my confidence," she said.
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Not gossip. This is information that is directly relevant to how well an employee is performing her job. Sharing information about difficult students or classes enables the teachers to collaborate on how to deal with such students as a group, or to help teachers having a difficult time to learn strategies to better deal with them.
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She said she also heard about teachers who made inappropriate comments to students about sex, a clear violation of school policy and professional standards.
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Reporting someone who is flagrantly violating the rules isn't gossiping, it's just responsible behavior.
The problem I see with this is that it seems to define "gossip" very loosely, as if anything anyone says about another person is gossip, as if all small talk is gossip. Hearing bad things about another person's personal life isn't likely to give me any information I need to be able to work with that person better. Information about how and how well they do their job I wouldn't classify as gossip, as that information helps me to relate to that person on a professional level and enables me to do my job better.
This is, I think, the reason I dislike those celebrity news shows and so forth. I don't want to know about the personal lives of celebrities, as that can only interfere with my ability to enjoy their work, but not enhance it. Likewise, I don't want to know about my colleague's personal foibles. So long as they don't affect his or her ability to do his or her job, it's just personal information that can only interfere with my ability to work with them.
I work with middle schoolers, and the gossip can get pretty nasty and really end up with hurt feelings. Both sexes do it, but the girls tend to be a lot more nasty about doing it for the purpose of ostrasizing those they disapprove of.
Among adults in a corporate setting, they may very well be right about it being a positive thing. I have no experience with that. And I'd have no way of knowing it's effect among school personnel, as I'm one of those who is "out of the loop" so to speak at school. But the examples they give seem to be somewhat ambiguous, and they seem to avoid admitting that there are negative effects.
I can't say I've every benefitted from a piece of gossip.
Gilda