Don’t feel guilty about enjoying a good gossip
Baku, December 7 (AZERTAC). Whether at a coffee morning, or when social networking or yakking over the garden fence, we Brits love to gossip. A friend’s rocky marriage, your neighbor’s ghastly kids, a colleague’s affair - all are fair game. And, according to a new survey by a cosmetic company, women are particularly prone to a good chinwag: 85 per cent relish hearing juicy titbits, and one in 10 finds it hard to keep a secret.
Which makes it all the more reassuring to know that, rather than mindless bad-mouthing, gossip can be a healthy activity, providing social cohesion and enhancing feelings of well-being.
“Gossiping boosts levels of positive hormones like serotonin, reducing stress and anxiety,” says psychologist Dr Colin Gill. This is because when we gossip, we’re taking an interest in what other people have to say and vice versa, and bonding with them makes us feel happier, releasing those feel-good chemicals.
Comparing ourselves favorably with the people we’re talking about - known as “peer-referencing” - has a similar effect. “Gossiping often involves a lot of laughter, which boosts all the 'happy’ chemicals in our brain, and even gives us a little bit of a muscle work-out, too,” says Dr Gill.
In evolutionary terms, gossip enables us to gather useful information about people’s characters and behavior, according to Harvard University researchers writing in Science. This helps us protect ourselves from “liars and cheats”. It enables us to live in big groups and is, in a suitably apt analogy, the human equivalent of apes picking fleas off each other.
Sharing salacious titbits with others seems to be a necessity and is a habit dating from when we were cave-dwellers; it evolved as a way of ensuring we got our fill when the hunters hauled a carcass into the cave. Gossip was a means of swapping social information about people in the group - to find out how they might behave when it came to sharing the spoils.
Nowadays, gossiping is still vital to group cohesion. Dr Gill says: “It’s a good way of finding out what kinds of behavior are socially acceptable in your group. If somebody raises their eyebrows as they tell you something about somebody else, you modify your behavior accordingly.”
As a prolific gossip, I agree that sharing a bit of tittle-tattle can give a delicious thrill, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God frisson. Is that healthy? “Not if the gossip is malicious and unpleasant,” says Dr Gill. “Then it can make the people party to it feel stressed. And gossiping can backfire if you peddle something you know to be untrue, as people can feel anxious about being caught out.”
Indeed, the British Psychological Society has published research that found that gossiping is good for you - as long as it is tempered by a spirit of concern, which is just as well, because clearly many of us love to gossip, on Twitter and Facebook, on the golf course and, uninhibitedly, on mobile phones. “Gossip is a necessary part of human life,” says Gill. “Ninety-nine per cent of what people communicate is about other people. It’s one of the key things that makes us successful as a species. Without it we’d die.”
Other news in this section
