Do We Need to Gossip? A structural Analysis of Gossip and its Functional Manifestations in Society

Résumé

The tendency to gossip is at the heart of the social life of many people, and most casual conversations are concerned with matters of social importance. All available historical information and cross-cultural data suggest that this has always been the case. Language and the ability to share gossip may have enabled ancestral human beings to form large cooperative alliances and to exploit diverse and uncharted ecologies. Most of the evolutionary research on gossip has focused on its social control function within groups. gossip asserts collective values or establishes normative boundaries, the effect of this being to increase group cohesion, and as a sanctioning mechanism of moral policing. sociologists have long argued that gossip may be an important mechanism through which people can resolve social dilemmas. and that social cooperation can be an evolutionary stable strategy if group members can exchange gossip that conveys reputational information. the totality of evidence to date demonstrates argued that heterosexual women may use gossip as their primary weapon of choice to derogate same-sex rivals in order to damage their reputation and render them less desirable as mates to the opposite sex. This involves attacking the physical attractiveness and sexual reputation of other women, which correspond to men’s evolved mating preferences.