Gossip usually focuses on negative aspects of a person's personal appearance, personal achievements, or personal behaviors. A less benign form of gossip is when people talk about information about celebrities or other prominent people in tabloids or social media. When most of us hear the word gossip, we resort to thinking of malicious rumors or a juicy secret. But gossip can generally be defined as talking about someone who isn't present.
Whether it's a conversation with your co-workers or a group chat with your friends, we all gossip. And it's something that comes naturally to many of us. The best response to gossip can also be to simply laugh. Who cares what people say about you? Does Your Opinion Really Matter? If mean people talk about you or someone has the wrong impression, is there a difference for you? Laugh at gossip and people will soon get bored and move on to talking about someone else.
A physiological distinction must also be drawn between active and passive participation in gossip. For the experiment, participants looked at the face of someone they didn't know and then heard some gossip about them. A preventive attack can deactivate any possible material that could generate gossip and make people who like to talk about others lose their breath. In another of Feinberg's studies, a group of participants identified members who behaved selfishly through gossip and quickly expelled them.
On the other hand, when they could actively gossip about the person or situation, it calmed them down and reduced their heart rate. Some scholars view gossip as evidence of cultural learning, as it offers teaching moments and providing people with examples of what is socially acceptable and what is not. Only a small part of the conversations analysed, around 15%, were considered negative gossip (although positive gossip represented an even smaller part, with only 9%). According to Dunbar's work, gossip gives humans the ability to disseminate valuable information on very large social networks.
Emotional sadism: Someone who comes across as tough, aggressive, intimidating, or degrading is rooted in gossip. And as the news almost inevitably returns to the source of such gossip, it can “serve to keep people under control, morally speaking,” Robbins adds. Torres's research has found that gossip can prevent loneliness, while other studies have found that it can facilitate bonding and closeness and serve as a form of entertainment.
Leave Reply