Guess what? There's no harm in a little gossip

Helpful or harmful?
Not all gossip is necessarily of the negative "Well, hasn't she gotten plump" variety; it can even be helpful. There are people to whom I've given second chances after hearing something sympathetic through the grapevine. And how grateful I am that I have. "Her husband's having an affair" might be salacious, but it also may explain why a formerly friendly colleague has suddenly stopped coming by to chat.

Gossip could even be mentally beneficial, like crossword puzzles or sudoku. A University of Michigan study found that chatty socializing is an effective mental exercise for boosting memory and performance — just as effective, in fact, as more traditional kinds of mental exercise. So my early-morning phone calls, then, are a warm-up for my workday, like the lazy, limbering 10 minutes I log on the bike before starting to exercise.

None of the science, though, addresses being the victim of mean-spirited talk, and none of it should be taken as a get-out-of-jail-free card for your conscience: Nasty gossip is still just that.

Not too long ago, someone in the fashion industry started a fairly vicious, anonymous blog. It discussed bad outfits, who was sleeping with whom— much of which I considered unnecessarily cruel. Why splash what could be harmful somewhere it might sting? Doesn't this person have any friends? I wondered.

Gossiping about people within your social circle can feel most dangerous because you know the parties who could be harmed by its spread. I tend to consider celebrity gossip fairly harmless as its subjects are so far away from my life. I feel instantaneously guilty about speaking badly about someone I know, but speaking about strangers who appear in magazines seems as harmless as debating what the relationship between Batman and Robin was really about — which is to say, entirely surreal. Then again, one has only to consider the troubling case of Britney Spears to feel a few pangs of gossip guilt.

Damaging rumors
And, of course, gossip can be particularly damaging when it isn't true. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany recently performed an experiment in which two types of information were available to the subjects: hard data (including their own observations) and gossip from other study subjects and the researchers themselves. The majority of subjects believed the secondhand information above the hard data.

The conclusion we can draw from this study is that gossip is treated as more valuable information than our own observations — for better or for worse. We tend to doubt ourselves because we are never able to observe everything all at once. Even when presented with hard facts, many of us suspect we haven't been given the whole story. We believe the real truth is being kept from us. But gossip feels special and privileged.

Its lies can stubbornly persist. A friend was once the subject of a nasty rumor that, painfully, made its way into the stark black-and-white reality of a gossip column. "But they'll have to run a correction!" I naively told her, and I believed they would. (The rumor was patently false.) "It wouldn't even matter anymore," she (older, wiser than me) explained at the time. "Once something's out there, it's as good as true." It caused her a huge amount of grief, and even now, years later, there are plenty of people out there who still think first of that terrible rumor when they hear her name.

Last year, four female employees of a government office in the tiny town of Hooksett, New Hampshire, were fired for gossiping about their boss. The town council claimed that these women (who became known as the Hooksett Four, as if they were a crew of dusty bandits from the Wild West) had engaged in speculation over their boss's rumored affair. The women said they believed that knowledge of the affair was integral to understanding the social dynamics of their workplace. But their boss claimed he was concerned about his reputation and the effect such talk could have on his career and family. Was the firing of these women rash? Perhaps. But who hasn't been harmed by gossip?

Case in point: Years ago, thanks to some unusually thin walls, I overheard a woman I knew discussing a small bit of my life with someone. It was infuriating and bizarre. I felt naked and exposed. I immediately stormed over to a friend; I ranted, I raved. I questioned everything about the gossiper. And then I gossiped about the gossiper, lobbing nastiness right and left. My friend laughed and flapped his hand at me. "Do you feel better?" he asked. "Are you even?"

I was instantly chastened. I had been far ruder in my retaliation than this woman had been about me. I realized that gossip begets gossip. Since then, I've made some rules about gossip for myself: Although I'll still use up my cell-phone minutes on my walk-to-work chats, I'll also examine my motives, and if I'm unkind, I'll consider the implications.

But I'll forgive myself. I'm only human. And after all, gossip may be, in its own odd way, keeping us all alive and walking across the savannah.

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