Gossip's Dirty Little Secret

"It feels so good to talk to you."

Gossip is much older than Franklin. It's downright primal. McAndrew and others argue that gossip is pleasurable because it is necessary for survival. "Gossip is like sex," he says. "It is so much fun that people can't stop themselves from doing it."

Humans gossip in the same way that chimpanzees groom each other. In chimps, grooming causes endorphins to be released in the brain, inducing euphoria. In humans, gossip generates a small high, which is magnified by laughter. "This may well explain why we spend so much time in our social conversations trying to make each other laugh," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Gossiping and laughter literally make us ecstatic.

Dunbar believes that gossip may be the primary reason that Homo sapiens developed language in the first place. Monkeys and apes can learn about each other's behavior only through what they see directly, but human language lets us know what happened before we got there. "If you came into a large organization and you had to wait to see everything you needed to know firsthand, you would never get the hang of things," says McAndrew.

True to this theory, people across cultures spend the majority of their conversational time exchanging social information. "We can talk about people we know all night and never get bored," says Dunbar. "But if I try to give you a lecture on Kent's Theory of the Unthinkable in Physics, your eyes glaze over in about 10 minutes. This leads us to conclude that the mind and language are predisposed to handle social rather than technical things." It is nearly impossible to explain scientific concepts without charts or diagrams, but the minutiae of office politics are easily expressed over a cup of coffee.

"And then he just dumped her... over the phone!"

Gossip scares us because we know that information can be used against us. But some people deserve bad reputations—liars, cheats, freeloaders and others who manipulate and abuse our trust. Eric Foster of Temple University uses mathematical models to simulate gossip chains. He has found that the denser the social network, the more honest people are. In societies in which everyone talks to everyone else regularly, not only are liars and cheats caught quickly, but individuals aren't tempted to cheat. In small towns, people don't lock their doors because nobody steals from other people's houses.

Our ancestors probably spent most of their time in clans of no more than 150 people and rarely dealt with people they didn't know. In such small groups, gossip can be a highly effective means of self-policing. The problem is that for the most part, we no longer live in communities where everyone talks to everyone else. "Dealing constantly with strangers isn't something we do very well," says McAndrew. In our highly independent, mobile society, sociopaths can move from place to place and never be caught. We now register sex offenders because we don't know our neighbors' pasts. Instead of the grapevine, we have private investigators and background-checking Web sites.

"No, no, his monkey was named Bubbles. His son is called Prince."

These days, neighbors and co-workers know fewer and fewer people in common. Enter Hollywood. While you may share no mutual acquaintances with the Starbucks barista or the TV repairman, you can both feel sorry for Jennifer Aniston and wish a pox on Angelina Jolie. Psychologist Charlotte De Backer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies how celebrity culture influences social interactions. "Young people especially use celebrities in conversations to become friends with new people they encounter," she says. "It's an easy-access tool to build a bond." In fact, De Backer finds that teenagers who don't keep up on celebrity gossip have fewer friends and have more difficulty relating to their peers.