Psychological Effects of Rumors and Gossip

Dirt, mudslinging, hearsay and tittle-tattle are words synonymous with gossip. According to Encarta
English dictionary, gossip is a conversation about personal or intimate rumors or facts, especially when
malicious; informal and chatty conversation or writing about recent and often personal events. In my
personal opinion, I think that Gossip undoubtedly destroys friendships, marriages, business, and
sometimes causes people to kill themselves and others. That chatty talk about other people's intimate
matters is now a favorite pastime around every school and workplace. If asked, most of us would say
gossip is a bad habit, yet our culture treats it lightly. Everyday we can access websites, watch television
shows, or read tabloids to get the latest news on celebrities and politicians. Some websites even send you
an e-mail alert on late-breaking gossip. (Peterson, 159-67)

In our world of reality TV, being aware of intimate details of a person's life is socially acceptable. Some
people believe that "dishing," "getting the goods," or hearing "the dirt" on someone is a natural part of the
human species, as apes and monkeys, humanities closets kin used language to keep up to date on the
happenings of friends and family, just as we do. They believe that in order to stay in touch and close, we
need to make conversations. Some people believe that the damage that is blamed on gossip more rightly
belongs on people who have acted badly and such people will blame gossip for holding them morally
accountable for their behavior. (Pendleton, 69-86)

I do not deny that those facts are sometimes true and humans need a way to communicate, but the way we
communicate can affect how we view people and how other people perceive us. Good verbal
communication is an excellent resource for our daily life and what we say, and how we say it, affects
more people than any other actions we take. For example, if a man cheats on his wife, is it "right," to
gossip about it or "wrong," to do so? I think it depends on the circumstance and sometimes it would be
better for the wife to be informed and sometimes it would not. But how do we know when it is right or
wrong to tell and will it benefit, or destroy the person's life we are talking about? That's a really tricky
question and I think the only person who can answer this question is the person who we are talking
behind his/her back. I think that gossiping about someone who did something "bad" is even "worse" than
what the person we are talking about did. Gossip hurts people mentally and sometimes even physically,
so we should act now and stop this bad habit before it is too late to do so. Because when you spread a
rumor about someone and then find out that it is wrong it, it is really hard to take it back because the wind
has already scattered them. (Pendleton, 69-86) Psychological Effects of Rumors and Gossip

Dirt, mudslinging, hearsay and tittle-tattle are words synonymous with gossip. According to Encarta
English dictionary, gossip is a conversation about personal or intimate rumors or facts, especially when
malicious; informal and chatty conversation or writing about recent and often personal events. In my
personal opinion, I think that Gossip undoubtedly destroys friendships, marriages, business, and
sometimes causes people to kill themselves and others. That chatty talk about other people's intimate
matters is now a favorite pastime around every school and workplace. If asked, most of us would say
gossip is a bad habit, yet our culture treats it lightly. Everyday we can access websites, watch television
shows, or read tabloids to get the latest news on celebrities and politicians. Some websites even send you
an e-mail alert on late-breaking gossip. (Peterson, 159-67)
In our world of reality TV, being aware of intimate details of a person's life is socially acceptable. Some
people believe that "dishing," "getting the goods," or hearing "the dirt" on someone is a natural part of the
human species, as apes and monkeys, humanities closets kin used language to keep up to date on the
happenings of friends and family, just as we do. They believe that in order to stay in touch and close, we
need to make conversations. Some people believe that the damage that is blamed on gossip more rightly
belongs on people who have acted badly and such people will blame gossip for holding them morally
accountable for their behavior. (Pendleton, 69-86)

I do not deny that those facts are sometimes true and humans need a way to communicate, but the way we
communicate can affect how we view people and how other people perceive us. Good verbal
communication is an excellent resource for our daily life and what we say, and how we say it, affects
more people than any other actions we take. For example, if a man cheats on his wife, is it "right," to
gossip about it or "wrong," to do so? I think it depends on the circumstance and sometimes it would be
better for the wife to be informed and sometimes it would not. But how do we know when it is right or
wrong to tell and will it benefit, or destroy the person's life we are talking about? That's a really tricky
question and I think the only person who can answer this question is the person who we are talking
behind his/her back. I think that gossiping about someone who did something "bad" is even "worse" than
what the person we are talking about did. Gossip hurts people mentally and sometimes even physically,
so we should act now and stop this bad habit before it is too late to do so. Because when you spread a
rumor about someone and then find out that it is wrong it, it is really hard to take it back because the wind
has already scattered them. (Pendleton, 69-86)

The Power of Negative Gossip: Coloring How We See the World, One Rumor at a Time

Gossip: you can’t avoid it. And maybe, you shouldn’t want to. Scientists have argued that gossip is an
important tool for social cohesion and information transmission, allowing us to function more effectively
in an ever-larger society. Moreover, it’s an important tool for affective learning: it can give us a sense of
who would make a good ally—or who we should avoid—even in the absence of direct contact. But can
gossip influence our minds on a more profound level? Recent findings presented in this
month’s Science suggest that yes, it can. Gossip, it turns out, can influence something as fundamental as
visual processing – especially if that gossip is negative.

How gossip affects our actual perception of the world

In the study, researchers used a typical paradigm used to study visual processing, binocular rivalry.
Binocular rivalry results from two different images (for instance, a tree and a cat) being presented to each
eye. The images then compete for dominance, and we end up consciously seeing only one of the two
images (for instance, the cat), while the other image is suppressed. But after a few seconds, the images
flip: now, we see the tree, and the cat disappears. The process repeats, and we see a series of alternative
pictures: cat, tree, cat, tree, etc. However, the two images are not necessarily given equal playing time.
One might actually dominate and be visible for a much longer period of time than the other. Often, this
happens because of simple physical characteristics of the image (i.e, luminance, contrast), or because of
its content (for instance, emotional images tend to dominate over non-emotional ones).

In this case, subjects saw neutral faces, with exactly the same visual properties. These faces were paired
with a house. In theory, neither image should have been dominant, and none of the faces should have
stood out from one another. However, there was a crucial prior step. Each face had first been associated
with a piece of gossip – either positive, negative, or neutral.

What happened? Faces that had been paired with negative gossip dominated far longer than any other
stimulus. This was not true of either positive or neutral gossip. Hearing something negative about a
person, then, can actually influence our basic visual processing, causing us to choose to focus on that
person over other possible people (and objects).

The consequences of focusing on the negative

So, gossip—especially of the nasty kind—not only influences our perceptions in a more abstract sense
(Who do we like? Who don’t we like? Who matters?), but also in a very literal sense, physically changing
the way we see the world.

Is this a good thing? Some might argue that yes, it is. It could help protect us from people who do bad
things: we focus on them for longer, learn more about them and their behaviors, and in so doing, are
better able to deal with the consequences and identify similar bad events, like lying or stealing or
cheating, in the future.

However, what about false gossip, or the malicious spread of rumors – something that has become
increasingly widespread in the world of social media? Or even a simple mistake resulting from
misinformation? We’d be more likely to hone in on that, too. And what we’d learn in that case would not
necessarily be true or even helpful. And consider the person in question: the extra scrutiny that comes
from our biological, physical focus on him because of the negative gossip comes at a high price to
reputation – and one that can’t be undone by a simple addition of positive information, since, as the
research has shown, positive information does not carry the same privileged weight. That makes
remedying a mistake (or a malicious stab) all the more difficult.

The importance of being aware of gossip’s power over our minds

That last point holds even for true negative gossip. We might be able to correct something we did, or
make up for it in some way, but the negative event will haunt us for far longer and will remain much more
salient – something that’s especially true as our mistakes follow us in perpetuity in cyberspace.

And here’s the kicker: when we focus in on someone because of some negative gossip, whether it’s by
actually looking at him longer in person, or choosing to read more about him online, we might not
actually realize we’re doing it. That’s the power of simple visual processing. Something to remember the
next time we do something gossip-worthy ourselves – or find ourselves drawn to some negative gossip on
others.

Fine Popular and media interest in rumor and gossip never seems to wane, but psychological research on
rumor has been cyclical and that on gossip has, until recently, been dormant (Foster, 2004). World War II
saw a burst of interest in the psychology of rumor and rumor control. Seminal work was done by Gordon
W. Allport and Leo Postman (1947), the impetus for which was their concern about the damage to morale
and national safety caused by menacing rumors spreading needless alarm and raising extravagant hopes
(p. vii). There was some formative research in the following decade (e.g., Back, Festinger, Kelley,
Schachter, & Thibaut, 1950; hachter & Burdick, 1955) and then a period of quiescence. Another cycle of
interest is evident in the late-1960s and 1970s, starting with the publication of sociologist Tamotsu
Shibutani's (1966) book, the Kerner et al. (1968) report on civil disorders, and Milgram and Toch's (1969)
essay on collective behavior, followed by other books written from a sociological or psychological
perspective (Morin, 1971; Knopf, 1975; Rosnow & Fine, 1976). More recently, there has been another
spate of books on rumor and gossip (Fine & Turner, 2001; Goodman & Ben-Ze'ev, 1994; Kapferer, 1990;
Kimmel, 2004; Koenig, 1985; Levin & Arluke, 1987; Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998; Turner, 1993). There
has also been a flurry of research and conferences focused on these and related forms (e.g., Fine, Heath,
& Campion-Vincent, in press), though there continues to be more theory and speculation than empirical
research. Nonetheless, there have been empirically grounded insights.
We should distinguish between rumor and gossip, as each appears to function differently in its pure state.
Rumors have been described as public communications that are infused with private hypotheses about
how the world works (Rosnow, 1991), or more specifically, ways of making sense to help us cope with
our anxieties and uncertainties (Rosnow, 1988, 2001). On the other hand, as Wert and Salovey (2004b)
noted, "almost as many functions of gossip have been argued as writers to write about gossip" (p. 77).
More than rumor, gossip tends to have an "inner-circleness" about it, in that it is customarily passed
between people who have a common history or shared interests. Popular usage defines gossip as "small
talk" or "idle talk," but gossip is hardly inconsequential or without purpose (e.g., Gluckman, 1963;
Goodman & Ben-Ze'ev, 1994; Rosnow & Georgoudi, 1985; Sabini & Silver, 1982; Spitzberg & Cupach,
1998). For example, it has been theorized that gossip played a fundamental role in the evolution of human
intelligence and social life (Dunbar, 2004; Davis & McLeod, 2003) and that it continues to play an active
role in cultural learning (Baumeister, Zhang, & Vohs, 2004) and as a source of social comparison
information (Suls, 1977; Wert & Salovey, 2004a). To be sure, it is often noted that rumor and gossip can
also be undeniably aversive and problematic-currently illustrated, for example, in the way that rumor and
gossip have generated resistance to medical efforts to deal with HIV and AIDS (e.g., Smith, Lucas, &
Latkin, 1999; Stadler, 2003).
Allport and Postman called their most far-reaching assertion "the basic law of rumor." It declared that
rumor strength (R) will vary with the importance of the subject to the individual concerned (i) times the
ambiguity of the evidence pertaining to the topic at hand (a), or R ≈ i × a. The basic law of rumor was not
empirically grounded in any rumor research, but was adapted from the earlier work of Douglas McGregor
(1938) on factors influencing predictive judgments (Rosnow, 1980). One difficulty with the basic law of
rumor was that the factor of "importance" was elusive and not easy for researchers to operationalize. Also
of concern was that the basic law of rumor ignored the emotional context of rumor. Based on subsequent
research findings, Rosnow (1991, 2001) proposed a modified theory in which rumormongering is viewed
as an attempt to deal with anxieties and uncertainties by generating and passing stories and suppositions
that can explain things, address anxieties, and provide a rationale for behavior. At a molar level, we can
usually distinguish between two types of rumors (Rosnow, Yost, & Esposito, 1986), those invoking
hoped-for consequences (wish rumors) and those invoking feared or disappointing consequences (dread
rumors), but finer distinctions within each category have been described as well (e.g., DiFonzo & Bordia,
2000). Another addendum is that people have a tendency to spread rumors that they perceive as credible
(even the most ridiculous stories), although when anxieties are intense, rumormongers are less likely to
monitor the logic or plausibility of what they pass on to others (Rosnow, 2001).
These modifications of the classical view of rumor have implications for how potentially damaging
rumors may be effectively combatted (DiFonzo, Bordia, & Rosnow, 1994; & Turner, 2001; Kimmel,
2004) and have recently served as a stepping stone for other researchers' innovative work. For example,
Chip Heath, Chris Bell, and Emily Sternberg (2001) have been exploring how rumors and urban legends
thrive similarly on information and emotion selection. They have developed the thesis that rumors and
urban legends are subsets of what biologist Richard Dawkins (1976) called memes, reasoning that there is
a cultural analogy between ideas that compete for survival and biological genes.
As another recent illustration, Air Force Captain Stephanie R. Kelley (2004), for her Master's thesis at the
Naval Postgraduate School, did a content analysis of 966 rumors collected in Iraq from a weekly feature
in the Baghdad Mosquito. Proceeding from the idea that rumors serve as a window into people's
uncertainties and anxieties, she identified fears inhibiting cooperation with U.S. counterinsurgency efforts
and formulated ideas for improving Coalition information campaigns. That rumors might be projections
of societal attitudes and motivations goes back to the classic work of Robert H. Knapp (1944), who sorted
through a large collection of World War II rumors printed in the Boston Herald's "Rumor Clinic" column
and collected through the auspices of two mass circulation magazines, The American
Mercury and Reader's Digest. Knapp settled on three categories of rumors: pipe-dream rumors, bogies or
fear rumors, and wedge-driving rumors.
Social psychologists Nicholas DiFonzo, at Rochester Institute of Technology, and Prashant Bordia, at the
University of Queensland in Australia, have collaborated in another significant program of research on
rumor and rumor control (and are putting the finishing touches on a book to be published by the APA).
Their work has largely focused on the sensemaking aspect of rumors at the individual level, exemplified
by a series of studies exploring how rumors are embedded with stable cause attributions that affect
perceptions and predictions in systematic ways (DiFonzo & Bordia, 1997, 2002). Whereas traditionally
the dynamic of rumor was studied employing a one-way communication paradigm resembling the
telephone game, these researchers have studied it in rumor discussion groups (Bordia, 1996; Bordia &
DiFonzo, 2004; Bordia, DiFonzo, & Chang, 1999; Bordia & Rosnow, 1995), for example, a chat group
discussion of a rumor in cyberspace over a 6-day period. They have uncovered systematic patterns in both
the content and level of individual participation, consistent with the theoretical idea of rumormongering
as a collective, problem-solving interaction that is sustained by a combination of anxiety, uncertainty, and
credulity (Bordia & Rosnow, 1995).
Empirical gossip research has not coalesced into a mainstream approach. Most researchers are in accord
that the term can apply to both positive and negative aspects of personal affairs and that, depending on the
point of view, it can have positive or negative social effects. An early factionalism was reflected by the
opposing views of Gluckman (1963), who maintained that gossip served the interests of the group, and
Paine (1967), who countered that gossip was a tool wielded by individuals for personal advantage.
Wilson, Wilczynski, Wells, and Weiser (2000), using evaluations of gossipy vignettes, showed that
gossip that upheld group norms tended to reflect better on the gossipers (and more harshly on the targets)
than self-serving gossip did. Studies have also focused on individual differences in gossip use, perception,
and vulnerability (e.g., Davis & Rulon, 1935; Jaeger, Skleder, & Rosnow, 1998; Litman & Pezzo, 2005;
Nevo, Nevo, & Derech Zehavi, 1993; Radlow & Berger, 1959).
In a forthcoming chapter (Foster & Rosnow, in press), we use social network analysis (SNA) to explore
how the structure of the network-the links among all the members-can affect the potency of gossiping
behavior. The SNA approach simultaneously takes into account the density of the network and the
positions of individuals within it to predict how gossip will affect influence and group coherence. We
found that denser networks are less vulnerable to social fragmentation from gossip. However, this effect
is moderated by "gatekeepers" who tend to position themselves along unique social bridges between other
network members. Disintermediating, that is, increasing the density of social connections around
gatekeepers, is expected to decrease negative effects of gossiping and to assist in improving norm
coherence. Thus, the structure of the gossip network, as much as the content, can contribute to collegiality
and understanding as well as to inequality and conflict.

Bad gossip affects our vision as well as our judgment

You’re chatting to some friends at a party and they point out someone standing in a different part of the
room. That person, they inform you, is a nasty piece of work. He cheats on his girlfriend. He picks fights
with strangers. Once, he bit a puppy. You’d never seen him before but after this character assassination,
you start noticing him everywhere – in other parties, on the street, on Facebook.

This sort of thing happens all the time. If we get information about people from third parties – gossip –
we start paying more attention to those people. There’s a simple reason for this. Gossip, especially
negative gossip, affects not only our judgment, but our vision too. It influences both what we think about
someone and whether we see them in the first place.
Eric Anderson and Erika Siegel from Northeastern University studied the influence of gossip on our
vision with a simple experiment, which plays off a well-known conflict between our eyes. When each eye
sees a different image (say, if they stare down different tubes), those images compete with one another for
dominance. This is called “binocular rivalry”, and the brain acts as the arbitrator. It chooses to
consciously experience one image and suppress the other. The result: even though your eyes sense both
images, you only “see” one of them.

This lasts for a few seconds, before the images flip. The suppressed image becomes dominant, and the
dominant one fades to view. These flips are largely out of our control, and you can work out which image
is better at capturing the brain’s attention by looking at how long each one spends in the top spot.

Scientists have done this in study after study. We know that images win the rivalry if they are brighter, if
they have sharper contrast, and if they are strongly emotive, such as scary faces or disgusting scenes. This
time, Anderson and Siegel showed that faces are more likely to dominate if they’re shown along with
negative statements, rather than positive or neutral ones.

They showed volunteers a series of neutral faces that were paired with short descriptions of social
behaviour – either positive (“helped an elderly woman with her groceries”), neutral (“passed a man on the
street”) or negative (“threw a chair at his classmate”). Afterwards, they stared down a “stereoscope”, a
device that presented different images to each eye. They saw one of the earlier faces with one eye and a
house with another, and they pressed a key whenever the dominant image flipped.

The duo found that the faces stayed longer in the volunteers’ consciousness if they had been paired with
negative gossip (4.9 seconds), compared to either positive or neutral gossip (4.3 seconds). They also
outlasted new faces that the volunteers hadn’t seen before.

It seemed that the recruits spent more time consciously seeing the faces if they had been paired with
negative gossip. But negative information is more easily and more quickly learned – this could also have
explained the results. To rule that out, Anderson and Siegel repeated the experiment with a few twists.

This time, before the stereoscope task, they tested the recruits on the faces they had learned, until they
remembered those linked to positive and neutral statements as well as those linked to negative ones. They
also paired the faces with social statements as well as socially irrelevant ones such as “had a root canal
performed” (negative), “felt the warm sunshine” (positive), or “drew the curtains in the room” (neutral).

For the social statements, Anderson and Siegel found the same thing as before – the faces paired with
social gossip were better at outcompeting the house images if the statements were negative. But if the
statements weren’t socially relevant, it didn’t matter whether they were positive, neutral or negative.

The duo sum it up best: “Hearing that a person stole, lied, or cheated makes it more likely that a perceiver
will consciously see that structurally neutral but purportedly villainous face.” When given a choice, our
brains prioritise those faces for conscious attention.

This is an important idea, and worth repeating: what we “see” isn’t simply dictated by the signals that
travel from our eyes to our brain. Our brain processes these signals by smoothing out inconsistencies and
focusing our attention on important details. This is why we don’t see a gaping dark hole where our blind
spot is. It’s why the world doesn’t periodically go dark whenever we blink. It’s why when you burn your
hand, the feeling of pain and the sight of your recoiling limb seem simultaneous, even though the touch
signals reach your brain first.
And it’s why a negative statement can make a face stand out more than a positive one. Our brain offers up
a view of reality that allows us to get on with our lives, but that’s always somewhat of an illusion.

It might be disheartening to learn that we focus on the bad rather than the good, but it is also easy to
imagine why this is. As Anderson and Siegel write, “this preferential selection for perceiving bad people
might protect us from liars and cheaters by allowing to us to view them for longer and explicitly gather
more information about their behaviour.”

The concept of gossip has negative connotations for many people but, there’s no denying that it can be
valuable. As Anderson and Siegel write, “Gossip is a way to learn socially relevant information about
other people’s character or personality without having to directly experience their triumphs and
misadventures. Whether delicious or destructive, gossip is functional. It provides human beings with
information about others in the absence of direct experience, allowing us to live in very large groups.”

We don’t have to meet every person who is relevant to our lives; we can learn about them through our
contacts. “Gossip allows human beings not only to transcend one-to-one interaction for getting along and
getting ahead, but also to know the “value” of people we have never met. [It] is a powerful way to learn
whom to befriend, and even more importantly, whom to avoid, all without the costly and time-consuming
process of learning from first-hand experience.”

Reference: Anderson, Siegel, Bliss-Moreau & Feldman Barrett. The Visual Impact of Gossip. 2011.
Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1201574