Why Talking Behind Someone’s Back Isn’t Always Bad

Frank McAndrew has heard it more times than he can count. Someone finds out he studies gossip and says, with great indignation: “I never gossip.” His first thought, every time? “You must be the most boring person in the world.” McAndrew, an evolutionary psychologist at Knox College in Illinois who’s spent decades studying the science of talking behind people’s backs, has a message for the self-appointed gossip-free among us: You’re almost certainly wrong about what gossip is, and you’re definitely wrong about whether it’s bad.

Most of us think of gossip as a character flaw—petty, mean-spirited, something to be ashamed of. But researchers who study it say we’ve defined the word so narrowly that we’ve managed to villainize one of the most fundamentally human behaviors there is. The emerging science of gossip suggests that most of it isn’t malicious at all. And some of it, it turns out, has been holding society together since the beginning of human civilization.

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