Robb Wilier is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California. Berkeley. He recently co-authored a paper called The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial Behaviour, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His research has proved that some kinds of gossip are altruistic and beneficial to society. No matter how fundamental his research is, many people find it difficult to accept such an opinion.

Research has been going on for several years about the ways in which fears for reputation encourage people to behave. This led to get interested in gossip because gossip involves spreading reputational information about people in groups. More specifically, the authors were interested in an apparent tension between the bad reputation gossiping and gossipers have, but how there’s a lot of ways gossip has useful social functions.

In the first study, they attached participants to heart-rate monitors and monitored their emotional reactions to events they observed in the lab. One thing they observed was people doing economic exercises based on trust. The researchers arranged so they would observe someone behaving in unthrustworthy way repeatedly; then the participants would have a chance to warn someone else they thought would have to interact with that person next.

People very readly warned the next person, passing on socially useful information to them. But what was more interesting was the emotional register of the behaviour. As people saw a person behave in an untrustworthy way, they became frustrated and their heart rate increased. But when they had the opportunity to pass a warning on, that reduced or eliminated their frustration and also tempered their increased heart rate. It is prosocial gossip that involves warning other people about untrustworthy others. It is pretty common, onerous people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a need to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to spoil another s reputation or advance oneself.

So why does gossip have such a bad reputation? This research has just sharpened that question. Why would it be that gossip, which we need to function socially in order to keep people behaving a bit better than they might otherwise, has a negative reputation? It could be that we don’t need gossip to have a positive reputation for people to do it. Even the people who pass judgment on gossipers are gossiping as they do so. It may be that socially we’re wired to gossip. Evolutionary theorists have argued that language evolved in part to facilitate gossip, so we’ve developed these social norms against excessive or malicious gossip to keep the system from getting out of hand. News in a lot of ways is dignified gossip. A broad definition of gossip would include the news. I wonder how many journalists would agree with or share such interpretation of news and their role in a society?

It s very important that we discriminate between different kinds of gossip and the people who do it. The kind where you warn people about untrustworthy others is valid, so we shouldn’t feel bad about that.