Tuesday, February 23 : The Evolutionary Psychology of Gossip

 

Learning Targets: I can use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons.
I can establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms 
I can cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

Essential question: Are tabloids the result of evolution?
Class directions:

Please read the following excerpt from

Of Tabloids and Family Secrets: The Evolutionary Psychology of Gossip

Note the two salient points made by the authors.

In a couple of well-written paragraphs (approximately 250 words and including textual evidence), discuss the value of their research in terms of understanding human interactions. 

Please send along, as usual.

FRANCIS T. MCANDREW AND MEGAN A. MILENKOVIC                         Knox College

Two experiments tested hypotheses about gossip derived from an evolutionary perspective.

In the first experiment, 128 people ranging in age from 17 to 62 years ranked the interest value of 12 tabloid stories about celebrities differing in age and gender. In the second experiment, 83 college students ranked the interest value and likelihood of spreading gossip about male or female professors, relatives, friends, acquaintances, or strangers based on 12 different gossip scenarios. The results of these experiments confirmed a consistent pattern of interest in gossip marked by a preference for information about others of the same age and gender. Exploitable information in the form of damaging, negative news about nonallies and positive news about allies was especially prized and likely to be passed on. The findings confirm that gossip can serve as a strategy of status enhancement and function in the interests of individuals, and that it does not just function as a means of social control within groups.

The tendency to gossip is at the heart of the social life of many people, and most casual conversations are concerned with matters of social importance (Dunbar, 1996). All available historical information and cross-cultural data suggest that this has always been the case (Barkow, 1992; Cox, 1970; Lee, 1990; McPherson, 1991; Paine, 1967; Schein, 1994).

Levin and Arluke (1987), among others, proposed that gossip is universal because it is psychologically and socially useful. Within the field of social psychology, the few attempts to tie gossip into a larger body of theory have typically described it as a form of social learning or social comparison (Levin & Arluke, 1987; Morreal, 1994; Suls, 1977). In other words, gossip is a way to get information about others that can give us guidance for leading our own lives or increased feelings of self-worth through comparison with others (Levin & Arluke, 1987). Gossip can be an especially appealing way to acquire social-comparison information because it is so indirect and nonthreatening. Comparing oneself to high-rankingpeople may be important in self-evaluation, but doing so directly and publicly could be risky and threaten the standing that one already has (Suls,1977). Thinking about gossip as a form of social comparison can be even moreuseful if the connection between social-comparison processes and gossip is embedded in a larger theoretical context that will help to make greater sense of both. It seems as if the perspective offered by evolutionary psychology might provide such a unifying principle.

The available evidence suggests that our ancestors lived their lives as members of small cooperative groups that were in competition with other relatively small groups (Dunbar, 1996; Lewin, 1993; Tooby & DeVore, 1987). To make matters more complicated, it was not only necessary to cooperate with in-group members for success against out-groups; in-group competition was unavoidable insofar as it was necessary to divide resources among the group members (Krebs & Denton, 1997). Living in such groups, our ancestors faced a number of consistent adaptive problems that were social in nature: obtaining a reproductively valuable mate; and successfully managing friendships, alliances, and family relationships (Shackelford, 1997). The social intelligence needed for success in this early environment required an ability to predict and influence the behavior of others (Alexander, 1979; Barkow, 1989, 1992; Humphrey, 1983). Any process that provided fitness-relevant information would have been strongly selected for, and an irresistible interest in gossip (especially when coupled with a tendency to engage in social comparison) would have been handy indeed. Thus, a strong drive to quickly gather and exchange social information for the management of social alliances would have bestowed a tremendous advantage on those individuals with such predispositions.

Does gossip play a role in natural selection?

Boehm (1999) further proposed that gossip could serve as a leveling mechanism for neutralizing the dominance tendencies of others, a “stealthy activity by which other people’s moral dossiers are constantly reviewed” (p. 73). Boehm believes that small-scale foraging societies, such as those typical during human prehistory, emphasized an egalitarianism that suppressed internal competition and promoted consensus seeking in a way that reduced within-group selection pressures and increased the importance of between-group differences in the selection process. These social pressures discouraged free riders and cheaters and encouraged altruists (Boehm, 1997). He also believes that such egalitarian societies were necessary because of the relatively equal and unstable balance of power among individuals with access to weapons and shifting coalitions. In these societies, the manipulation of public opinion through gossip, ridicule, and ostracism became a key way of keeping potentially dominant group members in check (Boehm, 1993).

The aspect of gossip that is troubling to many is that it is not only a mechanism used by groups to enforce conformity, but it can also be a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations and selfish interests at the expense of others (Dunbar, 1996; Emler, 1994; Spacks, 1985). When framed under within group selection, gossip is very much about enhancing one’s own success in social competition (Barkow, 1989). Gossip offers a means of manipulating others’ reputations by passing on negative information about competitors or enemies, as well as a means of detecting betrayal by others in our important relationships (Shackelford, 1997; Spacks, 1985). According to Barkow (1992), we should be especially interested in information about people who matter most in our lives: rivals, mates, relatives, partners in social exchange, and high-ranking people whose behavior can affect us. Barkow also proposes that the type of information that we seek should be information that can affect our social standing relative to others. Hence, information about control of resources (e.g., financial news); sexual activity; current alliances and political dealings; and an individual’s reputation as a reliable, trustworthy partner in social exchange will be especially interesting to us. All of these speculations about the within-group selective advantages of gossiping make sense and are consistent with evolutionary thinking. However, in contrast to the aforementioned experiments documenting the social-control functions of gossip, there has been very little empirical evidence that gossip does in fact function to promote selfish individual interests.

Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities provided by the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members. After all, anyone whom we see that often and know that much about must be socially important to us. This will be especially true for television actors in soap operas that are seen on a daily basis. In fact, it has been documented that tabloids prefer stories about television actors who are seen regularly to movie stars who are seen less often. These famous people become familiar friends whose characters take on a life of their own (Levin & Arluke, 1987). The public’s interest in these high-status members of our social world seems insatiable; circulation of supermarket tabloids and magazines such as People and Us run into the tens of millions per week. People seem to be interested in almost all aspects of celebrity lives, but unflattering stories about violations of norms or bad habits are most in demand. Stories about ordinary people typically only make it into the tabloids if they concern extraordinary events (Levin & Arluke, 1987).