Your mother may have taught you not to gossip, but new research suggests it doesn't always lead to disaster.
Researchers determined hearing gossip could help individuals adapt to a social environment, determine potential threats, and even leanr how they can improve as a person or employee, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology reported.
To make their findings the researchers asked participants to recall an incident in which they received either positive or negative gossip about another individual, they were then asked to measure the "self-improvement, self-promotion, and self-protection" value of the received gossip information. They found those who received positive gossip had self-improvement value while those who heard negative gossip experienced self-promotion and self-protection value.
"For example, hearing positive stories about others may be informative, because they suggest ways to improve oneself," said lead researcher Elena Martinescu. "Hearing negative gossip may be flattering, because it suggests that others (the gossip target) may function less well than we do. However, negative gossip may also be threatening to the self, because it suggests a malign social environment in which one may easily fall victim to negative treatments."
In a second study researchers assigned the particpants to the roles of sales agents and asked to imagine they had written a job description and received either positive or negative gossip about another's job performance. The scenario included two conditions: "a performance goal condition, and a mastery goal condition."
Those who had a salient performance goal tended to outperform other people and participants while those who had a salient mastery goal strived to be more competent by learning new" knowledge, abilities, and skills." There were also found to be gender differences that affected how individuals responded to certain types of gossip.
"Women who receive negative gossip experience higher self-protection concerns possibly because they believe they might experience a similar fate as the person being the target of the gossip, while men who receive positive gossip experience higher fear, perhaps because upward social comparisons with competitors are threatening," Martinescu said.
"[We should] accept gossip as a natural part of our lives and receive it with a critical attitude regarding the consequences it may have on ourselves and on others," she concluded.
