Over the summer, in an effort to improve myself, I wrote a list of my behavioral and emotional habits that I would like to work on, and what unmet needs I felt could be driving these habits. One thing on this list was “gossiping.” In figuring out why I felt so compelled to gossip, I began to see it as a more primal activity.
Culturally, gossip has a poor reputation. Through the feminization of gossip — the societal framing of it as a “bitchy” frivolity — and how it’s become synonymous with talking shit about other people, the social and emotional functions of gossip are massively overlooked.
Gossip allows us to make sense of abstract thought: When we gossip about people productively, we are analyzing their behavioral patterns, which includes contextualizing their actions with their intrinsic motives and external influences. Hence, despite its reputation as mean-spirited, good-faith gossip can deepen understanding and empathy, better equipping individuals to navigate and resolve referenced conflicts.
Take a hypothetical: Katy and Damon are frustrated with Marcus, their lab partner who never contributes to the lab reports and instead spends most of the time oversharing about his personal life. Venting to each other after class, Katy and Damon aren’t just releasing pent-up frustration, they’re likely analyzing Marcus’ behavior. Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or maybe he was misplaced in an advanced lab, or maybe he doesn’t have much of a social outlet and turns to them to share his personal stories.
Based on this analysis, Katy and Damon can gather the best approach for conflict-resolution: if they’ve determined from their observations that Marcus doesn’t understand the material very well, maybe they’ll advise him to seek tutoring or review the slides before the next lab; If they’ve determined Marcus simply isn’t willing to help out, maybe they’ll have a conversation with him or ask for a different lab partner. When done properly, gossip can translate irritation and conflict into understanding and strategy.
Say, from another angle, Marcus is feeling slighted by Katy and Damon, who, from his perspective, seem to be icing him out. He gossips about them with a friend, and when the discussion turns to his experience in their lab and him considering sending them a passive-aggressive text, alluding to how he’s feeling hurt by them, his friend reframes the situation (“Well, do you only talk to them when you should be working?”), encouraging Marcus to view the situation from another perspective instead of escalating interpersonal struggles. In this context, a secondary opinion was a check on impulsive and reactionary aggression.
On another level, we are bonding with people we gossip with. Of course there’s an obvious “in-group/out-group” element, but it’s often deeper than that. Sharing frustrations in a trusted circle builds intimacy, as we see the values and beliefs of our friends in how they interpret different situations. That intimacy removes the societal expectation to politely pretend we’re endlessly patient and easygoing, and in doing so, we prove that we trust our friends to not weaponize our venting (in the example, Katy trusts Damon to not tell Marcus all the things Katy said about him).
It seems that what gossip has come to entail, and not gossip itself, is the problem. It too often slips into cruelty, fixes people into static antagonistic roles through the spreading of rumors, and reinforces societal norms that may be better off forgotten (slut-shaming is a classic example). Because of the spontaneous nature of the exchange of information, details that were shared in confidence can slip out in impulsive violations of trust and breaches of privacy. Through these areas, gossip can perpetuate cycles of conflict and hurt. But none of this is inherent to gossip.
I recently rewatched “The Good Place”, which draws from T.M. Scanlon’s “What We Owe to Each Other.” Scanlon argues that morality is about actions nobody could reasonably reject — and so, can we reasonably reject gossip?
The answer to this is nuanced: The morality of gossip depends on how the dialogue is contextualized. When there is an intention and an effort to gossip constructively rather than corrosively, we wield gossip as a social and emotional tool that gives us a space to process, empathize, connect, and relax.
Every day, we can decide to be kinder individuals and to fulfill the obligations we owe to each other as rational beings. We cannot entirely disavow gossip because of its bad reputation. Instead, we must redefine it. “Quitting” gossip is not as productive as reframing it as a nonjudgemental method of social observation and conflict resolution, centered on empathy.
After all, gossip isn’t only about what we say about others: It’s about how we choose to understand them.
