The scoop on office gossip

This is strictly between ourselves, but gossiping makes you popular.

According to new research from the University of Oklahoma, passing on hearsay and criticising others is one of the most powerful tools for making friends at work.
That may seem wrong, as most people would hope to avoid friendship with someone who might choose you as the next water cooler subject matter. The researchers at Oklahoma admit that gossip has its drawback, in that it can hurt someone’s feelings, but a shared negative attitude towards other people can intensify relationships.
This runs in the face of popular belief that being nice and complimenting people is the route to social success.
Jennifer Bosson, who led the research, explains why gossiping is more effective. “When people reveal to you a negative attitude about a third person, basically they’re telling you, ‘I like you, I trust you,’ so it makes the listener feel that they’ve been chosen,” she says. “Our perspective is not that it’s good to go around saying mean things, but that there is a positive side. It can amplify friendship between gossiper and listener. A shared dislike is a very powerful cue to friendship.”
Negative opinions in particular have a stronger impact than positive ones for several reasons.
“It’s partly that positive opinions are more common, so a negative attitude stands out and gets more attention,” says Bosson. “From the listener’s perspective, you’re learning more about the speaker – it’s more intimate.
“With positive comments, they could just be saying it because it’s the socially desirable thing. A negative attitude, on the other hand, violates our expectations, so the listener feels he’s really learned something. It’s almost as though the gossiper is engaging in self-disclosure.”
So saying something bitchy makes you stand out in a crowd. At the same time, it seems a big part of gossip’s appeal lies in its ego-lifting powers.
“When you discover you both dislike a third party you create an ‘in’ group – you and your new friend – and an ‘out’ group – the person being criticised,” says Bosson. “In that moment, you’re comparing yourselves and coming out on top, and that’s a common source of self esteem.”
Others share the view that gossip plays an important part in establishing social groups both in and outside the workplace. “Gossip is a bonding experience,” says Sandi Mann, a senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. “It’s uniting together against somebody and sharing information that allows the two of you to build a bond. Uniting against a common force builds the group.”
But the appeal of gossip goes further than just group dynamics. The Oklahoma researchers noted how there is something “especially delicious” about negative gossip. Mann agrees that something positive is not as “titillating”.
“It’s about sharing secrets,” she continues. “People like juicy gossip, they like to be in the know, and to say, ‘Look how important I am, I know a secret’. The person they tell the secret to also feels good because they’re being trusted.”
The peculiar power of specifically negative gossip to bind us together may lie in the fact that it makes us feel guilty. “There’s something forbidden about negatives that makes us a little guilty – a little uneasy,” says Frank Heller, an organisational psychologist and emeritus director of the Tavistock Institute in London. “The power of gossip is probably based on our feeling that it is delicious but not right.”
Mann says the physical equivalent of this guilt would be dealing in stolen goods – “you’ve committed a crime and someone else is implicated”.
Gossip is nothing like as shallow a business as people often think. And, contrary to popular opinion, no one gender does it more than the other.
Employers have long recognised the power of gossip. Frances Wilson, an HR adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, says that most bosses abide non-malicious gossip because it is an effective way of exchanging information. “Organisations want to encourage this sort of gossip as it means communication channels are open,” he says.
It is no longer just around the water cooler, though. Technology is changing the way that we gossip. According to IT specialist Marc Dowd, the Internet has replaced the coffee morning as the preferred medium for gossip. “Quite often people will run MSN Messenger all the time at work, depending on how closely they’re monitored, or log on to their home blog site,” he says.
A word of warning for those who want to blog about their working environments: “There have been cases of people blogging about their employers,” says Dowd, “and cases of people being sacked as a result.”