Confidences Are Not Given To Gossip Mongers

Gossip mongers inhabit all of our contexts. They wear sheepskin and feed on rumors with their sharp tongues, as if their lives depended on it. They also have that herd mentality capable of finding pleasure by delighting in the evils of others, violating trusts and weaving conspiracies behind our backs.

As punishable as these behaviors may seem, we are dealing with a type of psychological behavior that has existed since the beginning of time. Gossip is part of our biological essence as the social beings that we are. This is what, for example, a study published in 2008 in the journal “Scientific American” explains.

For his part, Robin Dunbar, a famous British anthropologist, psychologist and biologist, also developed a theory in which he spoke  of gossip as the breeding ground on which our language began to develop. According to him, while our ancestors groomed each other in their small social groups, they began to exchange information in a confidential context in order to strengthen ties.

Now,  there are many types of gossip, and a good part of it is devoid of malice. Many times with their exchange we only seek to collect information to eliminate the uncertainty of our closest environments. Our brain is designed to collect data in order to restore our cognitive balance and hence, we need what others can explain to us to overcome those dissonances, those information gaps.

An undoubtedly interesting topic that we will talk about next.

Characteristics of gossip mongers

Epicurus defined gossip as a natural pleasure, but not a necessary one. We could live our whole lives without spreading a single rumor or not being interested in them and nothing would happen, we would not die.

However, true gossip mongers need them in some way, because  gossip has a compensatory effect against their disappointments, their emotional emptiness, and their personal discomforts. We could say that they are like spices for your life, without them you feel that it has no flavor, that it is boring.

Furthermore, the biological mechanism that triggers the act of huddling with each other to share inside information about a person who is absent gives way to a very intense chemical reaction: serotonin, the hormone of happiness, is released. This explains why in certain people the act of spreading rumors is addictive.

Let’s see some more features below.

Strengthens the feeling of belonging to a group

For gossip traffickers, sharing gossip means consolidating an “us” to exclude a “them”. In this way, the feeling of belonging to a certain group is built, a common behavior in many work, school and even family contexts.

Provides the feeling of having a status

Whoever gets a confidence instantly achieves a weapon of power against someone, an instrument that well administered at a certain moment can be a great advantage. As Nietzsche would say, there are people in need of rank, status, and they do not hesitate to achieve it through mechanisms of dubious moral reputation.

Gossip creates “herd mentality”

We pointed it out at the beginning. The fact of being participants in a gossip and then spreading it to the four winds without knowing if it is true, without applying any filter of analysis or without evaluating whether that act is lawful, configures that unitary and rigid mind that says so little about our own evolution human.

In some way, it confirms that very close to us there is an envious man who invents a rumor, a gossiper who spreads it and a naive one who assumes it without resisting.

It is necessary to stop this type of behavior. Gossip mongers are simply stopped, stopping the spread of that gossip. The question is, how to achieve it? Well, applying the protection filters that we tell you below.

We explain how.

The psychology of gossip and how to manage it

Gossip is juicy and colorful but rarely does it serve a constructive role. So much so, that according to a report from the London Business School, gossip occupies almost 70% of the conversations in a work organization, to the point of using the gossip variable as a way to measure the productivity of a company.

“Not everyone repeats the gossip they hear, some improve it”

The providers of the wrong gossip and the peddlers of harmful gossip affect the dynamics of any environment. They are the germ of workplace mobbing and create insurmountable distances in that wiring that makes up a work environment, where employees distrust the direction and direction of their own human capital.

Now let’s see what kind of responses it is good to put into practice to avoid these dynamics.

How to stop harmful gossip

Let us first of all think that all gossip is liable to bring erroneous information or moral damage to another person or a group of people who are in the content of that gossip. Choosing to be a participant in it is a frontier that can turn us into gossip mongers, or on the contrary, into a wise shield that sees itself in the responsibility of stopping this dynamic.

• Gossip can be a way of socializing, but we must be able to differentiate gossip that seeks to provide new, honest, useful and meaningful information from that for more harmful purposes.

• Learn to distinguish reliable information from simple assumptions as well. 

• Make it clear that you do not want to participate in the cliques where malicious gossip is spread.

• Be cautious, intuitive and very prudent when offering your confidence and your confidences to someone close to you. It will always be better to practice wise prudence and discreet silence, rather than fall into the networks of gossip mongers.

To conclude, it is clear that “radio macuto” fits more in a nursery school than in our work contexts, as a neighbor’s staircase or as friendship. However, it is good that we get used to the idea that these behaviors will always accompany us. Think that the simple fact of turning a deaf ear to poisoned languages ​​will prevent us from having many problems.

Images courtesy of Catrin Welz-Stein