Psst… Have You Heard The Gossip?

 Psst… Have You Heard The Gossip?

Gossip. You hear it all the time. Or maybe you don’t- all those little tidbits floating around in the air like the stench of stale cheese from hallway to auditorium to friends to colleagues all the way right outside your front door. And you might not even know about it. Did I just make you paranoid? Well, don’t worry, because the topic for this article is one that you may not have foreseen- the brilliant benefits of gossip unbeknownst to much of mankind.

Yes, you heard me right. Researchers in the Plotkin Research Group in Mathematical Biology in the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences recently assembled a mechanistic math model showcasing the relationship between gossip and cooperation. The authors- Mari Kawakatsu,  Joshua B. Plotkin, and Taylor A. Kessinger- state that gossip can actually help facilitate discussions that hold people accountable for their actions.

After all, sources like social media, news, and journals only depict to the world a select few shades of people’s character. Oftentimes gushing with bias, these sources fail to consider the minutia of one’s life. Such details come especially handy in situations concerning job interviews, business, and interactions for school and work. For example, let’s say that you want to hire a client. He looks good on paper, the interview with him doesn’t reveal any red flags, and his social media comprises images of him playing with his dog. Aww! A cute puppy. How perfect- this candidate seems like a lovely addition to our firm! Yet, through a closer examination, after paying attention to the gossip rustling in the wind from people who know the client, it is divulged that he actually has no job experience whatsoever and lied on his application!

Now of course, this scenario may seem a bit absurd or inconsequential to many of your readers at home. After all, why would anyone go through all of that effort when they could just find out about the guy while getting to know them? How would we even know if the gossip is true in the first place? To answer the first question, consider situations in which the ramifications are not so light. You end up making poor choices with a friend others warned you about. You idolize a movie actor just to find out that they were engaging in criminal activities all along. You get stuck with a lab partner in school who cuts corners and leaves you to do all the heavy lifting. Sometimes, doing a little bit of digging first reveals the gossip that could even save your life.

But how about the second question? According to the same research study mentioned earlier in this article, “the population must gossip for longer to stabilize the equilibrium” in order to subdue the effects of the gossip. In other words, don’t immediately trust one of your acquaintances when they say that Joe down the street is a secret sociopath. Now, don’t go up to Joe either and ask if he’s a sociopath; his following outbreak may have one too many expletives for your liking regardless of his true nature. However, you should go around asking more people what they think about Joe, and whether they have heard things about him. If you find out that the first person who told you about Joe wasn’t being truthful, then you move on with your life and instruct that person not to spread rumors. Low risk. But if you find out from more gossip that Joe really was a “bad actor” as the research paper describes it, then you just saved yourself from a series of problematic future encounters. High reward.

Ok great. We get that gossip isn’t always bad. But where’s the data saying that it’s good? Well, most of that data is presented in the research linked to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but the process itself is rather trivial to explain. Essentially, a game theory model was employed by the researchers in which a donor and a recipient were each tasked with assessing one another’s credibility through a conversation with them. The “donor”, in this case, would be donating/sacrificing their time to try to cooperate with the recipient. The test subject donors were then tasked at the end of the cooperation session to advise the next set of donors on how cooperative and easy to work with the recipient in question was. The study chiefly examines the resulting effect of such advice/gossip on the new interaction between donor and recipient, and the outcomes are recorded and modeled mathematically before analysis. The report is far more comprehensive than this summary, but it is certainly worth checking out if you are intrigued by the topic.

Overall, common sense plays a bigger part than anything else. Gossip can have a plethora of benefits if done right, but the “scroll every two seconds” attention span of the modern generation isn’t able to harness such benefits effectively. We can greatly improve our abilities to utilize gossip and foster better communication, cooperation, engagement, and decision-making capabilities if we keep our heads clear and do our due diligence in researching and validating what people say they are. So yes, to answer the question in the title. I have heard the gossip. And you should too.