How Natural Selection Turned Us Into Busybodies

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Many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists are firmly convinced that our fascination with gossip has been hard-wired into us through evolution. To illustrate how natural selection may have produced such a species of busybodies, let us consider the lives of two hypothetical cavemen who are members of the same small hunter-gatherer society: I will call them "Slag" and "Grog."

Slag and Grog have grown up together as part of the same age cohort. Their mothers are cousins, and Slag and Grog played together daily as children. Being male, they would have faced predictable pressures and expectations as they matured in a polygamous society in which the high-status, most successful men took as many wives as they wished and had first dibs on the most attractive and desirable women. The guys further down in the food chain competed fiercely for the leftovers, and many men were shut out of the mating competition altogether.

Remember that a failure to attract a mate and to reproduce successfully is an evolutionary death sentence; reproductive success is entirely about flooding the next generation with as many of your genes as possible. Consequently, Slag and Grog would have desperately wanted to become guys whom women desired, and other men envied or feared.

This was the world that Slag and Grog had to navigate. To be successful, each had to establish a reputation for being a good hunter, a tough customer, and a reliable comrade during skirmishes with other villages.

How might gossip have figured into their quest for success?

Good Gossipers Prospered

Let us imagine that Slag has a keen social interest in what other people in the group are up to. He keeps up with the news on who the up-and-coming new hunters are, who is sleeping with whom, who has powerful political allies, and how solid the bonds between them are. Slag is especially interested in the affairs of other young men around his age, as this is the cohort he will compete with throughout his life. He is also somewhat interested in what is happening with the young women in his age cohort and younger, primarily as a means of tracking who is available, who is healthy, and who can be counted on to be sexually faithful.

It is also important to cultivate powerful, reliable political allies so Slag regularly assesses the trustworthiness of potential friends. By carefully tuning in to the gossip network, Slag keeps his finger on the pulse of his competitors' reputations.

It turns out that Slag's obsession with what is going on in other people's lives serves him well. He successfully avoids alliances with other men who may betray him or eventually become a liability in other ways, and he is good at hanging onto valuable friends. He effectively exploits cracks that develop in his rivals' relationships with their mates and allies because he knows what is happening before anyone else does. He is ready to swoop in and take advantage of social changes that can be made to work in his favor.

In the meantime, Slag is also good at employing the gossip network for his own self-promotion. By planting the right bits of information with just the right people, he can be assured that his achievements in hunting and war will be widely disseminated and that he will be eagerly sought after as a lover and ally by others in his group. Slag is also not above strategically passing along damaging information about his rivals through the gossip network when the time is right.

Over time, Slag flourishes. He has several beautiful young wives who have produced many healthy children, and he is thought of as a leader and is treated with respect and deference by the other men in the tribe. Slag attained prestige and mating success in no small part because he loved gossip, and this predisposition got passed down to his descendants and became more strongly selected for in each generation.

Poor Gossipers Struggled

Now, let us contrast Slag with hapless Grog. Grog is an earnest, well-meaning fellow. He is an adequate hunter and warrior, but for whatever reason, he has no interest in the private affairs of those around him. He keeps to himself, does his part, and hopes for the best.

However, this cluelessness comes back to bite him time and again. He never seems to be able to hold onto a mate for very long before she gets poached by other males higher in status and savvier about relationships than he. He regularly gets lured into unproductive alliances with Machiavellian men who use him for their own selfish ends and then abandon him when he is no longer useful to them.

Grog is not ostracized or persecuted by the group, but he becomes an object of ridicule and never quite rises to a position of influence. If he is able to mate at all, it is usually with older or less healthy women whose offspring may not compete well with the kids of guys like Slag, so in the race to transmit his genes to the next generation, Grog is severely handicapped.

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This drama will repeat itself generation after generation; at every turn, the genes of the busybodies will outrun the genes of individuals who simply mind their own business. This is how we have come to be the gossips that we are in the 21st century.

Evolutionary Pressures Differ for Females

Of course, the same competition was going on among the cavewomen in Slag and Grog's clan. Women who tracked the status of the men in their cohort and monitored and shared information about which men invested well in their children and which didn't, and which were kind to their wives and which were not, did well compared to women who weren't paying attention.

And the pressure to keep up with what other women were up to became an absolute evolutionary imperative. Women were often removed from the kinship group that they were born into because of "patrilocality," which was the common practice of women leaving home to join their male partner's tribe. Sometimes, this may have been voluntary, but often, it was the unfortunate result of having been kidnapped during a raid. These women were thrown together in a place with no genetically related female relatives to rely on for help with child-rearing, food sharing, and mutual defense.

To successfully negotiate this challenge, women had to be quite astute in judging the character of potential friends. They would especially value friends who were nurturing, trustworthy, and loyal. It would be important for the friends to be emotionally supportive and also for them to be a reliable source of information about the norms and politics of the new group.

So, having friends who could supply useful gossip and be counted on to take your side in disputes mattered a great deal because these new-found friends had to be counted on in all the ways that one would count on mothers, sisters, and cousins back in one's native group. Scrupulously monitoring the trustworthiness of other women through the grapevine could literally be a life-saving skill.

The modern vestiges of this need to verify loyalty in female friendships can be observed in the stereotypically meticulous attention paid to remembering birthdays and other life events, sending gifts and cards as reminders and reinforcers of friendship bonds, and regularly displaying cues of family-like investment as a way of advertising loyalty. (Speaking from my own long experience with male friendships, these niceties are seldom of much concern among men.)

The story of Slag and Grog illustrates how gossip works during competition between individuals in the same group. Behaviors that evolve through such in-group competition become established in a population because they serve the selfish needs of individuals who succeed at the expense of others.

Slag's descendants prosper because they inherit his talent for turning personal information about others to their advantage. In contrast, Grog's dwindling number of descendants falters because of their lack of interest in the private lives of others.

Consequently, although other evolutionary pressures were also in play, natural selection has partially shaped our psychology by selecting beneficial traits during direct within-group competition.