Can Gossiping Ever Be Beneficial? Two Experts Weigh In
A colleague I once worked with got on my nerves on a regular basis. I felt so triggered and affronted by her that I started to feel awkward interacting with her because it became harder and harder for me to hide my disdain.
Why did she provoke such hostility in me?
I turned to a mutual colleague to make sense of it. After parsing through the threads of my contempt, I realized that I found her too judgmental (yes, here I was judging the judgy!). And yet, despite how much it helped me pinpoint the source of my agita, I felt unkind and inappropriate offloading ugly thoughts about her with our mutual colleague because we're taught that gossiping is a waste of words and a pernicious form of troublemaking. The wisdom of the wise says that if you can't say anything nice, say nothing at all. Gossip not only makes the gossiper look bad but often needlessly (and falsely) damages the reputation of others.
Netflix subscribes to this point of view so staunchly that the company fired three executives last spring who complained about upper management over Slack (naively thinking it was a private channel of communication) because doing so went against the company's ethos, which espouses "radical transparency." On the company's website, it reads: "You only say things about colleagues that you are willing to share with them."
But there's a problem with this black-and-white approach to gossip. According to Jennifer Bosson, PhD, a professor and associate chair in the department of psychology at the University of South Florida, people often gossip to gain clarity on how they feel about things: "The ability to communicate with trusted others about negative feelings toward absent third parties is so fundamental to how we make sense of the world," she says, adding, "It helps people figure out what they do and don't like. It's how we figure out our values. 'Why did it bother me so much when so-and-so did that? Maybe that means I'm this kind of person.'"
Bosson thinks Netflix's policy makes an impossible demand on employees, one that individuals will never fully heed. If they understand they can't complain over Slack— granted, not the smartest venue for taking umbrage with higher-ups—they'll do it at their local bar or at a coworker's barbecue. It's human nature, according to Bosson.
Bosson, who's authored a handful of studies on the gossip, says her work shows that gossiping, especially about a shared dislike, improves social bonding. "My research shows that it helps you become closer to another person to gossip with them. It communicates to them that you trust them because you're making yourself vulnerable by violating a social rule"—a social rule that says expressing a negative attitude toward someone is taboo, especially in the workplace.
Her colleague in the field of gossip studies, Eshin Jolly, PhD, a postdoctoral student at Dartmouth College in the department of psychological and brain sciences, has found similar results in his research. He notes that gossip is also a form of communication in which one is "trying to resolve uncertainty about the social world. You don't know something and maybe somebody else does. They can benefit from your knowledge. And likewise. You're willing to share something maybe to help somebody else out." The happy outcome of being a reliable source of information vis-a-vis someone who has a shared point of view is that it "tends to build a stronger relationship so we end up becoming more connected in the process."
Jolly and Bosson identify three ways to ensure you are gossiping constructively, as opposed to destructively.
Seek self-knowledge
Gossiping serves a functional purpose, even if it's negative, if you're trying to make sense of something about your own psyche or the world around you. "We're talking about the kind of gossip where you're sharing your reactions; your feelings about what somebody else did or said or how they treated you, how they behaved, which is fundamental to our ability to be a social species. If we didn't engage in this kind of gossip, we would probably be much less cooperative as a species," she says.
Make sure your claims are fact-based
It's critical, in Jolly's view, that the information you're imparting is substantiated by evidence. "One thing we can do is ask ourselves, 'Are we putting something into the social world that's going to create more uncertainty, more distrust or is it substantiated?' Using gossip as a tool to help each other out, rather than sow more distrust and chaos, is a more effective way to use it," he says.
Keep the (positive) purpose front and center at all times
"As long as there's some human social goal we're working toward," Bosson says, gossip is functioning at an optimal level. What are we trying to work out individually and collectively? Is this conversation helping or hurting? If it's doing that latter, better to keep it zipped.
If someone goes off the rails and starts delving into salacious or spurious content, Bosson suggests disengaging from the conversation—she, for one, usually "wanders away to pet a dog!" when discussions take a creepy turn—or, more boldly, calling it out: "I'm not comfortable with this conversation." The point is to gossip in a way that productively serves you and those around you.
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