Psychology & Psychiatry

Psst! Have you heard that gossip isn't all bad?

Gossip is often considered socially taboo and dismissed for its negative tone, but a Dartmouth study illustrates some of its merits. Gossip facilitates social connection and enables learning about the world indirectly through ...

Health

Validating medical information on social media

Medical information and healthcare advice abound on the internet, both genuine, science-based information as well as spurious and fake. Research published in the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, looks ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Study busts myths about gossip

A new UC Riverside study asserts that women don't engage in "tear-down" gossip any more than men, and lower income people don't gossip more than their more well-to-do counterparts. It also holds younger people are more likely ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Have you heard? Gossiping isn't all bad

Gossiping helps a person develop a better understanding of their society's expected behaviours, researchers from The University of Queensland have found.

Psychology & Psychiatry

Receiving gossip about others promotes self-reflection and growth

Gossip is pervasive in our society, and our penchant for gossip can be found in most of our everyday conversations. Why are individuals interested in hearing gossip about others' achievements and failures? Researchers at ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Gossip and ostracism may have hidden group benefits

Conventional wisdom holds that gossip and social exclusion are always malicious, undermining trust and morale in groups. But sharing this kind of "reputational information" could have benefits for society, according to a ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Study shows mean screens prime the brain for aggression

Research over the past few decades has shown that viewing physical violence in the media can increase aggression in adults and children. But a new study, co-authored by an Iowa State University psychology professor, has also ...

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Gossip

Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others, It is one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and variations into the information transmitted. The term can also imply that the idle chat or rumour is of personal or trivial nature, as opposed to normal conversation,

Gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as "I help you and somebody else helps me." Gossip has also been identified by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist, as aiding social bonding in large groups. With the advent of the internet gossip is now widespread on an instant basis, from one place in the world to another what used to take a long time to filter through is now instant.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.[citation needed]

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA