Gossip

Gossip is sharing of social information. It has bad reputation, because of it tendency to be large part of human communication, and because it enable to distort information so it can harm the name of the target of gossip.

Gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as "I help you and somebody else helps me." Gossip has also been identified by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist, as aiding social bonding in large groups. With the advent of the internet gossip is now widespread on an instant basis, from one place in the world to another what used to take a long time to filter through is now instant.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.

Gossip take up to 2/3 of converastion time. It's suggested role is to defend aggainst free riders (parazite), or basicly against ingustice.

Gossip serves a useful social function in bonding group members together. In the distant past, when humans lived in small bands and meeting strangers was a rare occurrence, gossip helped us survive and thrive.

Gossip, I think, is dervied from the need to talk with others and look at problems from other perspective. It is a basic need to share in order to let the group coordinate more easly. While gossiping, people can create better SONs, and commun culture. It is also used to strenghten our social capital. Therefore people uses more time in gossiping then in actual planing and doing.

When sharing information, people do not usualy look for imdate results. They are, in most cases, just want to unlad the havy burden. They will appriciate good advise or help, after they will unload the burden.

People with low self-esteem and FFFF or system 1 decison making system, will use gossip to get reasurance that they are OK, and the others are bad. Therefore when there is a society with high precentage of system 1/FFFF decision system (conservatives), we may observe a lot of smear campains. In social wars, partisans may try to harm other by smear campain, carried by gossip.

Liberals usually despise gossip, because it serves to learn about celebrities, and other "unimportant" issues. But I think, this is because liberals are quiet "autistics" and due to deficit in amygdala and hyper-activity in the ACC, they are more interested in non-social knowledge, then in social knowledge.

creating better communication

To give the workers the silence to create as they want, managers use to handle politics in the background, without the workers attention. But this habit has flows. To be able to decide, workers need to understand the decision making system in the group. So they gossip to understand. And because gossip is also used for collations struggle, the information in the gossip-network tends to skew for slanders. This causes the organization to be perceived as having bad politics.

To solve it, I suggest that a better communication between the partners should be developed. Better understanding of how people can cooperate. This should be a quest for better communication within organization.

More Readings

on spears an gossip as a way to fight alpha dominant males read Hadit 2012, page p.199