3,078
edits
Changes
no edit summary
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<ref>McAndrew, Frank T. (October 2008). "The Science of Gossip: Why we can't stop ourselves". Scientific American.</ref>. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity<ref>Sommerfeld RD, Krambeck HJ, Semmann D, Milinski M. (2007). Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocity. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104(44):17435-40. PMID 17947384</ref>. 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<ref>Dunbar RI. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of general psychology 8: 100-110.</ref>. 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.
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 and Liberals|conservatives]]), we may observe a lot of smear campains. In social wars, partisans may try to harm other by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smear_campaign 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 "autheism" and due to deficit in amygdala and hyper-activity in the ACC, they are more interested in non-social knowledge, then in social knowledge.