Gossiping Is Fun. It’s Natural. And These People Won’t Do It. – DNyuz

In its most recent survey on the topic, the polling giant YouGov found that half of Americans admit to having “spread a piece of gossip.” YouGov did not report that the other half of Americans are filthy little liars, but it probably could have.

Gossip — often defined as informal talk about people who are not present — is a universal feature of human culture. It’s also long been the target of passionate, widespread censure. “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people,” says Leviticus 19:16. In “The Analects,” Confucius is reported to have said that “the gossip-monger is the outcast of virtue.” The Quran proscribes backbiting. In 2017, a neighborhood in the Philippines passed an ordinance against gossip, making it an offense punishable with a fine and an afternoon of picking up litter. Even in increasingly secular America, more than two-thirds of Americans believe gossiping is usually or always bad for society.

And yet … who doesn’t gossip? “Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need,” wrote Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer and chemist. OK, sure, some of us don’t gossip, exactly, but we do vent. Or we get something off our chest. Some of us gossip only to our spouses, or only to our mothers, only about our mothers. Some of us spill the tea gleefully and at every opportunity. Some of us do it only when gossip is prefaced with a, “Now, you know I don’t like to talk bad about anybody.” But a key part of being human, a social animal, is talking about others in one form or another.

Isn’t it?

Except there are people out there who don’t obey nature, who try their best to deny themselves the satisfaction of that primary need, even in a world where the word “gossip” is associated more with a guilty pleasure than a sin.

I spoke with nearly a dozen of these people, whom I’ll call abstainers. The people I spoke with were almost entirely women. I found them through friends, through articles they’d written about gossip, through a Facebook group for Bay Area women. Different things motivated them. For some it was religion or karma. Many were inspired by Don Miguel Ruiz’s self-help book “The Four Agreements,” which preaches the importance of being “impeccable with your word.” One young woman had been motivated to examine her own speech after becoming the subject of hostile office rumors.

No one I spoke with claimed to be a perfect exemplar of pure speech, but all of them took it seriously. I sought out the abstainers in the hopes of understanding why these people would deny themselves what seemed to be a natural expression of human sociality. Also, I hoped to get a sense of how this choice affected their lives and their relationships. What were they getting out of it? I was curious, in other words, if they could be on to something.

I was first introduced to the idea that gossip is a harmful act through a particularly grating religious children’s song by Yossi Toiv, the guy whose musical stylings form the basis of the Kars4Kids jingle. Lyrics include: “Guard your lips from speaking evil / in your house and school and shtiebel!” (A shtiebel is a small, often informal synagogue.) This teaching was regularly reinforced throughout my childhood — at my Jewish day school, by my parents, even by my classmates.

As an adult living and working in the secular world, I’d noticed, of course, that not everyone shared the same compunctions about gossip as the religious culture of my youth (though, to be clear, many people in my religious community still gossiped, just with a little more shame). In the past few years I’d shaken most of my hangups about gossip, not because I believed it was particularly virtuous but because it was, well, fun. And because at work, I found that gossip was a way to bond with my colleagues — and even to get ahead.

Last year I realized that without being fully conscious of it, I’d come to spend a decent portion of my conversations talking about other people. Most often I was venting about some petty frustration or another: the hurtful thing a sibling had said, something thoughtless a friend or colleague did, the incompetence of a therapist. But these small irritations were adding up to a significant portion of my conversation time. They were beginning to meaningfully color how some people in my life (my husband) viewed those I most often complained about. And I was beginning to wonder whether talking about other people so much was making me more negative in general, more broadly critical, less happy. It was against that backdrop — wondering whether I needed to make a change in my own life, but not quite ready to commit to it — that I started seeking out abstainers.

In some ways, Jackie Pallas is exactly who you’d expect to swear off gossip. A dietitian living in San Francisco, Pallas is a practicing Catholic who describes herself as “kind of a goody-two-shoes.” She started thinking about gossip in her early 20s, mostly in the context of Catholic teachings about calumny and detraction — calumny referring to slander, detraction to the spreading of true, negative rumors.

Ms. Pallas, now 41, told me that many of the moral guidelines of her faith aren’t difficult for her to follow. But the prohibitions around speech — particularly detraction — nagged at her precisely because they posed such a challenge. It was hard to stop, though, and she still often joined in when others started gossiping.

It wasn’t until Ms. Pallas started attending an unrelated 12-step program, years later, that the issue became top of mind again. Her group emphasized minding your own business and “keeping your side of the street clean.” That got her thinking about gossip again, especially about what she was getting out of it.

“I used it as a way of kind of not examining my own life,” she told me, describing gossip as “an escape.” “I was thinking more about other people and what they were doing and how what they were doing was so much worse than what I was doing. And so I didn’t really have to think about myself.”

Ms. Pallas wasn’t the only one to describe gossiping as a distraction or a form of avoidance. The novelist E.M. Forster, in “A Passage to India,” described gossip as “one of those half-alive things that try to crowd out real life.” More recently, my colleague, the columnist Zeynep Tufekci, described the public’s fascination with gossip about Catherine, Princess of Wales, as a modern version of “bread and circuses.” Among abstainers, viewing tittle-tattle as a distraction was a common theme. For many of them, refraining from gossip is a way of ensuring necessary confrontations still happen.

Stevonna Gordon, a community health worker, isn’t afraid to let you know if she has a problem with you. This penchant for confrontation didn’t always result in positive outcomes. “I grew up a fighter,” she told me, adding, “just because of my mouth.” But as an adult she’s embraced a more effective — though still direct — communication style. Ms. Gordon doesn’t gossip to others, and she doesn’t like to hear gossip, either, especially at work.

“When people start, I disengage,” she says. When co-workers try to gossip to her about someone they have an issue with, “I’ll tell them, like, ‘Hey, that’s not my business. Why don’t you go tell her how you feel and come to some sort of resolution?’”

“People don’t like that answer,” she said.

The American philosopher and psychologist William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

I was curious about whether abstaining from gossip could, as many of the abstainers proposed, actually make you a less negative person. So I spoke with Dr. James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, which studies emotion.

When people engage in systematic patterns of behavior, “whether that’s trying to be really nice or whether that’s really being beastly to other people,” those systematic patterns and behavior “certainly affect our brains,” he told me, comparing self-control to a muscle that can be strengthened with practice.

He suggested I think about strategies to manage temptation — including temptation to gossip — as falling into three buckets: situational forms of control, which involve avoiding situations or people that could draw you into gossip; cognitive forms of control, which involve changing the ways you pay attention and think about gossip; and willpower. The white-knuckle approach is “not really going to build any capacity over time,” he said. But the other two strategies can be effective.

I thought about Dr. Gross’s first bucket: situational forms of control. Whenever I’ve considered really trying to stop gossiping, I’ve worried that abstaining would affect my friendships. Gossip, as many psychologists have argued (and as any schoolchild instinctively knows), is one of the fundamental ways human beings bond. Who wants to be friends with the person who shuts down a dish session just when things are getting good? Who wants to be friends with someone who doesn’t want you to vent to them about that crazy thing that Jessica did at the wedding?

My conversations with abstainers didn’t entirely appease this fear. One woman told me that she felt certain she’d have more friends if she gossiped more freely, or at least deeper friendships with a few people. Another said that she thought that her reluctance to engage in gossip might have affected her job growth, because “there’s so much that goes into, like, company politicking.”

But overwhelmingly, abstainers felt that the trade-offs were worth it, and that the relationships they did have were deeper, stronger and more trusting for their gossip-free nature. Dr. Gross’s framing helped me understand why.

I’d been thinking of friendships as something a person has, which she then stands to lose. But it’s more complicated than that. Friendships are, or should be, a mutual selection process: Two people are friends because they’re a good fit for each other. If I chose to stop gossiping entirely — if I changed the subject when other people were brought up, or if I left the room — I think most of my relationships would naturally adjust, the time once spent talking about other people filled instead by talking about books or news or future plans. But maybe the incorrigible gossips in my life (and there are a few) really wouldn’t want to hang out with me anymore. Except neither, according to Dr. Gross’s framework, would I want to hang out with them, because their behavior would be a constant temptation, one I’d probably want to avoid.

The second group of strategies Dr. Gross mentioned has to do with the way we use our attention and the way we think about things. The brain, he told me, can learn to shift its focus away from negative things, and the results can carry on even after we stop consciously trying. Someone who wants to avoid gossiping, he suggested, might reframe the urge by considering how gossiping might make him look bad. (Many of the women I spoke with mentioned that refraining from gossip helped them be perceived by others as more trustworthy.) Or he might try to focus instead on the positive elements of someone’s character.

This latter suggestion is more or less the strategy employed by Dassy Litchman, 35, an educator and mother of five who’s spent “a good chunk” of the last decade learning and teaching the Jewish laws regulating lashon hara, or evil speech.

“There’s almost this assumption that if you’re more intelligent, then you’re better at picking up on people’s flaws,” Ms. Litchman told me. We were talking about what happens in the best kinds of gossip sessions, the ones where you playact as psychologists, diving beneath “he did this” and “she did that” to “but you know why she really did that.” I thought of how accomplished I sometimes feel at the end of such a session, as if I’ve unlocked a secret of the human psyche.

“What I’ve found in my life is that the genuinely intelligent people are the ones with enough depth to see past the obvious flaws,” she said. For Ms. Litchman, interpreting someone’s qualities for the good, rather than ill, is a religious imperative, part of recognizing that everything in creation was created by God for a purpose. But it’s also a way of exerting self-control, a way of training her attention to seek out the positive rather than the negative.

One of the great ironies of gossip in the 21st century is that abstaining from it may be judged a morally dubious act. If gossip can help take down sexual abusers then isn’t it, in a way, unethical not to gossip? Or if sharing your experience with a man’s lousy dating etiquette could lead to him apologizing for ghosting his paramours, isn’t there a kind of obligation to warn others to stay away?

The social sciences, too, provide myriad — and increasing — reasons gossip is natural, or useful, or simply good. A recent study from Stanford and the University of Maryland found that gossip and ostracization are “tools that help groups to reform bullies, thwart exploitation and encourage cooperation.” In other words, for those who want to keep gossiping, there is no shortage of justifications for doing so.

But me, personally? I found the lives and relationships described by the abstainers compelling. I was intrigued by their optimism, by their grace, by their commitment to judging others by their best features. Which is not to say I’ve sworn off gossip entirely. But I’ve definitely cut back.

And what do you know? The less I judge people, the less I want to judge people. The less I complain, the less I want to complain. The less, maybe, that I even see things to complain about.

Now I call my sister not to rant about some passing offense but to connect over things that delight us, rather than frustrate us. (Or, you know, we talk about memes.) I recently moved to a new Jewish community and found that by cutting back on gossip, I’m able to dodge a lot of the politics that naturally arise when a group of people engages in a shared project. It turns out that when you don’t take sides, fewer people come to you asking you to take sides.

I can think of one friendship that has probably suffered from my new reticence to gab. But it’s a friendship with someone who habitually gossips about her friends and family and partner — a friend who, if I’m being honest, I’ve lately been thinking I can probably do without.

But maybe don’t tell her I said that.

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