Men’s Gossip: An Organisational Literature Review with Considerations for Future Directions.
Gossip is perhaps the most overlooked and understudied ubiquitous language behaviour enacted by humans; the corpus on men’s gossip (MG) comprises a limited section (Foster, 2004) of the modest corpus on gossip that is characterised by unresolved legacy debates from gossip, new debates specific to MG, and a narrow focus that “lacks analytical rigour” (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). The review begins at the etymological root of gossip, and its contribution to the folk linguistic stereotype that gossip is solely the domain of women, is one of several major debates that are at the centre of both gossip and MG; defining the topic names themselves being the most prominent. Frameworks discussed include concepts from evolutionary, organisational, personality, and social psychology combined with linguistic content analysis studies on gossip. This paper aims to review gossip generally with a minor focus on organisational psychology as a means for better understanding men in the context of friendships while highlighting the known differentiations of MG, and then will conclude with several suggestions for further investigation that could broaden the scope of both MG and gossip while striving for more consensus between the disciplines that are interested in both topics; consonant integration of several disciplinary perspectives should facilitate a broad but accurate understanding of gossip with a more nuanced and developed understanding of MG.
Room’s (1996) etymological definition of “gossip” (as cited in Michelson & Mouly, 2000) lists its origin as an Old English term, “godsibb” which was used to refer to the people present at the birth of children. During this time period, social norms were such that men were excluded from being present, and only women were permitted to attend; due to a lack of sufficient technology to be able to broadcast the news of a birth to the many people whom might be interested over varying distances, the people present (women) were expected to propagate the news to relevant people. Over time, with inevitable language change, the word’s form itself changed to become “gossip”, but the origins of the word that lead to the gender stereotype have been either long forgotten or wilfully ignored because the stereotype is recalled in many papers written on the topic of gossip as it pertains to gender. Regardless, studies that have taken the stereotype seriously have shown that the question posed by the stereotype, that is, “Who gossips more, men or women?” is poorly formulated. The studies that have been done to investigate this debate have yielded mixed results; Eckhaus and Ben-Hador (2019), and Dunbar (2004) show that men and women gossip in roughly the same amounts while Michelson (2000) concludes that the body of evidence is unclear for reasons such as women tend to gossip in areas that are more visible and public as compared to men and that regardless of differences in amount of gossip per gender, MG and women’s gossip (WG) share similarities but that the nature (features, functions and linguistic techniques) of said gossip differs significantly. Possibly the most fundamental debate around the study of gossip is that of the definition of gossip; two main areas of this debate involve differentiating rumour from gossip – are they different varieties of the same phenomenon or distinct phenomena (Michelson & Mouly, 2000), and is gossip a behaviour or a disposition (Nevo, Nevo, & Derech-Zehavi, 1993; Watson, 2012)? There is agreement by researchers that gossip can be both positively and negatively valenced (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004; Noon & Delbridge, 1993) but as this extends to gender, there is no consensus as to which gender’s gossip contains more or less of each type; Some of the most recent research indicates that females’ gossip contains more negatively valenced gossip than MG (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019). The circumstances and locations where gossip occurs is a definitional debate; Noon and Delbridge (1993) argue that gossip occurs privately while more recent research asserts that gossip occurs in both private and public discourse spaces (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Distinctions between public and private gossip have been made more ambiguous by the invention of online communication mediums and social media services, but the precursor to the online public gossip has existed openly as the mainstream media industry (print and audio-visual) for decades. Furthermore, ritualised settings such as comedic “roasts” amongst other public speaking events are public instances of gossip (Foster, 2004). Other areas of debate include the topics of gossip; some academics define gossip as only being about other individuals or groups (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019), while others’ definition is broader and also includes topics such as events, objects and other non-person phenomena (Dovchin, Pennycook, & Sultana, 2018; Foster, 2004; Johnson, 1994; Kniffin & Palacio, 2018; Kniffin & Sloan Wilson, 2010; Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Moreover, other areas of definitional debate aim to clarify which linguistic behaviours (or dispositions) come under the classification of gossip, for example, trash-talking from an organisational perspective that considers the workplace of professional athletes, include trash-talking as gossip (Kniffin & Palacio, 2018).
The following section will attempt to encapsulate the most agreed upon features of gossip. Included under the linguistic classification of gossip are comments that contain evaluative content about a third-party; the evaluative content points to an underlying moral foundation (Chua & Uy, 2014). Although many definitions specify that the third-party is absent from the discussion (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019; Foster, 2004), some studies have shown this feature not to be limited to only absent people (Michelson & Mouly, 2000; Sturtz, 2002; Watson, 2012). Gossip is generally acknowledged as being both ubiquitous and sanctioned while also being somewhat paradoxically considered to be undesirable or deviant behaviour (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004). The ubiquity of gossip has, in part, given the linguistic behaviour a perceived quality of insignificance or triviality, but some studies have demonstrated that gossip has meta-communicative value (Foster, 2004) that can be harnessed and utilised beneficially (Kniffin & Sloan Wilson, 2010; Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Within organisational structures, rare, neutrally valent, informative gossip (Foster, 2004) in the form of internal communications encourages agentive friendships by informing every member of their shared endeavours and achievements (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019; Watson, 2012). Gossip is not a pointless behaviour despite being so common; peoples’ gossiping behaviours are as much driven by intentional motivations as they are by incidental circumstances (Foster, 2004). An example of this might be workplace gossip that is intended to damage the reputation of a co-worker in order to reduce that person’s chance of securing a promotion that both employees are vying for; this is an example of a negative outcome that is unproductive because it damages not only the reputation of a person but also erodes cooperation within the organisation (Chua & Uy, 2014). It is because of outcomes like the previous example, that generally and within workplaces, gossip has a negative reputation (Chua & Uy, 2014; Dunbar, 2004; Foster, 2004; Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Much gossip is carried out in informal language (Michelson & Mouly, 2000; Noon & Delbridge, 1993), thrives in congenial social conditions (Chua & Uy, 2014) and provides people who participate in gossiping with what might be described as the original “cloud” knowledge base; a non-localised, derivative corpus of social norms and hierarchy information (Benwell, 2001; Foster, 2004; Sommerfeld, Krambeck, & Milinski, 2008) whose original sources typically remain speculative or unknown (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). While the speculative and largely unverifiable nature of the information contained in such social stores is subject to significant detail inaccuracies, gossip is particularly effective at retaining core themes and messages (Michelson & Mouly, 2000), and although gossip has a long memory, the topics discussed tend to be of a contemporaneous nature or relevance to either the gossipers directly or to their social environment, be it personal or in a workplace (Chua & Uy, 2014). Related to the issue of information integrity, gossip often requires a combination of the suspension of disbelief and a presumed factual basis underlying the content being retold (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Sommerfeld et al., (2008) demonstrated that data credibility and verification was an exercise in approximation; gossip participants judged multiple different but converging accounts about the same topic to be of better integrity than one individual account.
The functions of gossip are many, and their impact on the social order is significant; by no means exhaustive, the following list of functions includes social comparison as a means for orienting oneself and knowing one’s social position, within every social hierarchy that one is a member of (Chua & Uy, 2014; Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019; Foster, 2004; Michelson & Mouly, 2000; Sturtz, 2002). This function is universal to all forms of gossip and is known to generate self-improvement and change through self-evaluation; social comparison, by way of information exchange (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019; Foster, 2004), of one’s own reputation to the reputations of others, proximal and distant, is one of the psychosocial mechanisms by which reputations are built, maintained and destroyed (Foster, 2004). Reputational effects are not limited to this effect however, people that are known to be propagators of gossip tend to have reputations as such; typically, being a known gossiper has a negative connotative impact on one’s reputation (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004), unless the tone and topic of one’s gossip is known to be one of entertainment. Many people engage in gossip without a conscious motivation, one of the main functions of this type of gossip is entertainment (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004; Michelson & Mouly, 2000); entertainment gossip requires no specific skills such as are required to produce art and music, although individuals do vary in their ability to tell stories and relate events (Foster, 2004), and it functions to pass the time (much like reading literature) (Chua & Uy, 2014), and to provide cheap (or free) amusement as a method of catharsis (Michelson & Mouly, 2000).
Reputations are significantly mediated by gossip; Sommerfeld et al., (2008) demonstrated a strong relationship between trust, indirect reciprocity (IR) and reputations – behaviours of IR build communal trust through the spread of gossip, which result in reputational changes, both positive and negative. Nowak and Sigmund (1998, 2005) describe IR and improvements in the reputation of individuals who helped others as being mediated by the spread of gossip about the assistance event, and that as a result of this improvement of reputation, the individual who provided help receives more favourable treatment by those who heard the gossip; Duradoni et al., (2018) note that such reputational effects increase social fairness and trust. Social fairness is the extension of an evolutionary function of gossip that emerged to facilitate increased habitation group sizes; increased group size significantly improves predator avoidance and defence as well as improving the chances of successful mating and offspring rearing (Dunbar, 2004). Gossip does all of this by exposing individuals referred to as freeloaders, who take more than they contribute to their society (Foster, 2004), thereby bestowing them with a deserved negative reputation. Gossip also functions to the aforementioned ends by storing and spreading productive and essential societal knowledge in the previously described primitive “cloud”, and by facilitating self-advertising as a means to attract the best possible mate; conversely, gossip can also be wielded to deceive and take advantage of individuals and groups by the very same mechanisms (Dunbar, 2004), and paradoxically, both genders have been demonstrated to disapprove of self-serving gossip (Foster, 2004). Managing freeloaders occurs as a result of the influence that reputations present in terms of decision making; utilising reputational influence, gossip not only regulates the success of freeloaders however, it also reveals social radicals and extremists, and brings the full force of social influence to bear in either changing their habits and behaviours or by creating the necessary social circumstances for their expulsion from the society (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004; Sommerfeld et al., 2008). Michelson and Mouly (2000) note that vulnerability to social influence varies from person to person and is likely dependent on personality factors rather than gender (Foster, 2004).
The diaspora of gossip is a tangential topic to the functions of gossip; the spread of gossip occurs largely along the lines of friendships within and between groups (Chua & Uy, 2014; Foster, 2004; Michelson & Mouly, 2000; Watson, 2012). Positive outcomes of gossip include building trust and confidence in one’s peers and strengthening social bonds while generating solidarity (Michelson & Mouly, 2000; Watson, 2012); all of which often result in the formation of friendships. Research on friendship has defined two dimensions within which friendships exist, communion and agency; communion can be defined as aspects of friendship which are directly related to intimacy and closeness, and agency can be defined as aspects of friendship which directly relate to individuation, competency (incorrectly referred to as power (Peterson, 2002, 2018)), shared activities and teamwork (Watson, 2012). The functions of each dimension of friendship, while similar in that their functions overlap, vary generally and specifically across gender as it pertains to gossip (Watson, 2012). Friendship research that considers gossip to be a disposition and not a behaviour has identified three components of gossip that are particularly useful in teasing out the differences between genders; a social component, an achievement component and a physical appearance component (Nevo et al., 1993). The social component refers to social topics and measures of social involvement and is prevalent in both communal and agentive friendships; those who avoid gossip altogether, or try to, tend to be socially distant or isolated and hence have reputations that reflect this for better and worse (Foster, 2004). The achievement component emphasises the agentive dimension of friendship by way of focusing on social status through competency (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019), and the physical appearance component is self-explanatory (Nevo et al., 1993) and is more prevalent in communal friendships; the gender differences in these components will be discussed later. Further to distilling the functions of gossip, four categories of gossip have been documented by Michelson and Mouly (2000); wish fulfilment, anxiety, anticipatory and aggressive. Wish fulfilment gossip expresses the hopes of the gossiper/s. Anxiety gossip is driven by fear and tends to create social unease among those who hear it. Anticipatory gossip precipitates under ambiguous circumstances, especially in workplaces where uncertainty and confusion typically surround future projects or the hierarchical organisation of the company, such as internal restructuring. Aggressive gossip is the minority category that is sometimes referred to as malicious gossip (Dunbar, 2004); this gossip is generally intended to cause harm to the reputations of other individuals or groups. The friendship framework applies to dyadic (intentional) and group (systemic or incidental) social configurations (Foster, 2004; Watson, 2012); intentional trends tend to aggregate and manifest as systemic observations (Sowell, 1995). Chua (2014) identified that positive valence gossip propagates through both dimensions of friendships but that negative valence gossip tends to only propagate through the communal dimension.
Identity and personality are two perspectives that are utilised by researchers to study gossip; the identity factor considered in this paper is gender. Personality, as it pertains to gender, suggests that while there is much overlap between males and females, the differentiations at identity and personality levels produce different patterns of gossiping behaviour that function differently across genders and personality profiles. Study on the propensity to gossip in the workplace have uncovered five axioms which can be applied to the functions of the general concept of gossip; 1) gossip is used by individuals to build self-esteem and self-worth into their self-concept, 2) gossip is a coping mechanism in the constant struggle to manage anxiety, 3) gossip is used as a means to perform social comparisons of status, 4) gossip in many of its iterations is a form of social support, and 5) friendship dimensions affect a person’s propensity to gossip (Chua & Uy, 2014). Gossip often contains projections of basic life issues (Chua & Uy, 2014); exposing the discrepancies between private and public life by gossiping may cause some participants to experience social anxiety. The inability to manage anxieties as part of self-reflection will typically result in said anxieties turning into a source of personal neuroses; these neuroses reflect incongruity between one’s self-image and the ideal-self which leads to poor self-concept that is characterised by feelings of inferiority (Chua & Uy, 2014). In individuals with appropriate personality profiles (higher in trait neuroticism), this may produce a negatively valenced behavioural pattern that features aggressive gossip intended to ameliorate sensations of inferiority by damaging the reputations of those perceived not to experience said issues. As this pertains to gender, females generally exhibit higher ratings of trait neuroticism (Vianello, Schnabel, Sriram, & Nosek, 2013) which in the context of gossip results in more aggressive gossip and may also lead to more uncharacteristic, anti-social behaviour. In other individuals with appropriate personality profiles (lower in trait neuroticism), this may prompt growth and development to ameliorate the same sense of inferiority (Chua & Uy, 2014). Additionally, the more socially embedded that an individual is, the higher their propensity to engage in gossiping; whereas some individuals who exhibit socially detached personalities tend to engage in predominantly informative gossiping (Chua & Uy, 2014), while others who absconded from gossiping became further disconnected and marginalised from society (Foster, 2004).
Turning to gender, the corpus of research on gossip has identified distinctions between WG and MG1. Given the meta context of gossip as outlined above, MG has been demonstrated to be distinct from WG in aspects of both features and functions that include friendship component ratios, style, form, content, and circumstances. Both genders value and exhibit both friendship dimensions only in different ratios (Eckhaus & Ben-Hador, 2019); men’s friendships are more agentic than communal – there are dispositional factors such as emotional restraint which contribute to this distinction (Watson, 2012). Males prioritise the use of agency in friendships but do not sacrifice communal, close friendships in order to improve their status and reputation; men appear to use agentive gossip to communicate about shared activities, norms and values, to improve individual and group reputations by developing individuated roles within a structured role dyadic performance, and perhaps also to avoid physical confrontation (Watson, 2012). By not sacrificing close friendships as a means to meet their evolutionarily driven, mate selection needs of social status and prominence (Dunbar, 2004), men use communal friendship differently to women (Zarbatany, Conley, & Pepper, 2004). Achievement related gossip was found to be related to the quality of male friendships which reflects the individuation of roles within male groups; male friendship was also found to place a greater emphasis on status and lesser on intimacy as indicated by content choices that tended toward external topics (Watson, 2012). The quality of male friendships was positively correlated with the tendency to gossip, perhaps in part because males are more reticent to enter into close friendships (Vries, 1996) but when they do, they are less likely to sacrifice them but instead develop them through agentive informative gossip that is also strongly associated with male friendships (Watson, 2012). Commensurate with both gossip generally and agentive male friendships, MG topics included daily life matters of a personal and social nature, some of which referred to absent parties and others where the parties were present (Sturtz, 2002; Watson, 2012), content also included non-people topics such as objects, interests and culturally sanctioned events, in particular, the topic of sports featured heavily (Dovchin et al., 2018; Johnson, 1994; Kniffin & Palacio, 2018). Within the topic domain of sports, male spectators’ gossip focussed on achievements of teams as well as individuals; from the perspective of male athletes, gossip in the workplace has a distinct form which has been classified as trash-talking (Kniffin & Palacio, 2018), although its inclusion as a form of gossip is still being debated. MG topics appeared to be influenced by circumstances, in particular, the location where the gossiping occurred; workplaces yielded more work-oriented gossip, clubs and bars yielded more social and sports-oriented gossip (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). Additionally, as it pertains to topics, Eckhaus and Ben-Hador (2019) were able to predict the gender of gossipers by the topic quantities reliably; WG featured more gossip about physical appearance and social relationships whereas MG featured more achievement-oriented gossip. Lastly, a study conducted in 2002 that investigated the lunchroom conversations of men at a workplace identified a unique form of MG; men were consistently observed monologising. Monologising has been defined as an overt turn-by-turn basis for conversation where there are little or no instances of latching, overlapping, or verbal insertion (for definitions of the latter forms refer to Appendix A) (Sturtz, 2002); this form of gossiping has not been observed in WG which has a much larger corpus of study.
During the research for this review, several directions for future study on gossip became apparent. Research into gossip has been largely dismissed as being pointless given the commonality of it; the commonality of it is, in fact, the main reason why it should be studied more. To that end, from a pragmatic perspective, scalable monetisation is the best way to ensure said research continues; for this reason, organisational psychology is an ideal field to engage. Organisational psychology research is much sought after by businesses large and small, and they are willing to pay for proven methods to improve all aspects of their endeavours by better understanding one of the most common forms of communication within workplaces (Michelson & Mouly, 2000). In response to the observation made by Michelson and Mouly, future directions of study for gossip should aim to secure the expertise of neuroscientists to conduct fMRI and other non-invasive investigations into the neurocognitive bases of gossip. While gender is a useful identity feature for organising data for analysis, gender as a focus for such study is essentially blind without lower-level foundations in morality and personality to guide it; to this end, the author of this paper recommends Moral Foundations Theory which employs a three-level model to integrate the biological, psychological and social aspects of individuals into their cultural moral matrix (Haidt, 2012). Further, the development of better metrics and measuring instrumentation is also required; some of the studies that were omitted from this review were omitted because their experimental designs lacked analytical rigour and reliable instrumentation. In the current digital age, steps should be taken to integrate the study of online gossip utilising automated and semi-automated content analysis techniques such as data-driven content analysis and statistical techniques that utilise machine learning algorithms. Lastly, there is a cross-cultural knowledge gap around the role of individuation in MG; study of collectivist cultures as compared with individualistic cultures may reveal further insights into the features and functions of gossip.
In sum, while the corpora of both gossip and MG are small in comparison to their abundance, the area of study is one that requires a multidisciplinary approach; this paper has aimed to accentuate this by drawing on several disciplines’ work to compile this review. While some confused stereotypes continue to persist in general life, it is hoped that at a minimum within the academic field of inquiry, such stereotypes are taken seriously enough to study and verify but are put to rest when they have been verified one way or another. This review has attempted to show that consonant integration of several disciplinary perspectives can facilitate a broad but accurate understanding of gossip and a more nuanced and developed understanding of MG.
1This review is focussed on MG and any distinctions made where WG is mentioned is for contrast only.
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Appendices
Appendix A
Gossiping Linguistic Technique Definitions
Latching refers to occasions where the beginning of one speaker’s utterance either coincides with or comes immediately following the voicing of the final sound of the other speaker’s utterance; the timing of turns is an important feature that defines latching. Latching has been categorised into two types, collaborative and competitive; the latter being associated with men’s speech and the former with women’s speech. Men’s latching manifests as more of an interruption than collaboration as the speaker being latched onto loses their turn, and it passes to the latcher; this is not characteristic of women’s latching.
Overlapping is defined as circumstances where one two speakers talk simultaneously; how this differs from latching is not just in the conversation position where it occurs, that is, at the end of an utterance, it can occur at any point but also in the amount of speech that co-occurs. Women’s overlapping has been described as being indicative of spontaneity and an ability to multitask, whereas men’s overlapping has been described as poor timing and not understanding conversation flows.
Verbal insertions are instances where a speaker will contribute either a word or an utterance to the conversation turn of another speaker, mid-turn; verbal insertions are characterised by an absence of overlapping or latching (Sturtz, 2002).