2008 Woodie Awards
Gossip is misinformative, so I hear
Robert Berra
Staff Writer
Issue date: 10/22/07 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 1
"Did you hear that this guy we both know? He left his girlfriend of three years for this other girl. That girl got so angry that she, her mom and her sister started calling the guy's new girlfriend to threaten to kill her. The guy's new girlfriend then started calling them back and threatening them. The jilted girl has since threatened to shoot the new girlfriend when they see each other again."
"That's a nice story, but what really happened is that the original girlfriend broke up with the guy when she found out he was cheating on her. The new girlfriend is the one that started calling the old girlfriend to threaten to beat her up. Now the old girlfriend has a restraining order against both the boyfriend and the new girlfriend. You know that the boyfriend has a gun; when he sees the old girlfriend, it's over for her."
Gossip runs rampant in most social settings. This is not new, but a new study that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals individuals sometimes place so much stock in gossip that they accept it as true even if their own observations and experiences suggest otherwise.
"Gossip has a strong manipulative potential that could be used by cheaters to change the reputation of others or even change their own," lead author Ralf Sommerfeld of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology and his colleagues writes. "This finding suggests that humans are used to basing their decisions on gossip, rumors or other spoken information."
The experiment involved putting people in a situation where they were presented with gossip and actual facts. The findings were that people still responded to the gossip.
"If people would act rationally, they would only base their decisions on what they really see because they know exactly the past behavior of these people," Sommerfeld said. "But they were still influenced by this gossip."
We all know we do something like this every day. It is so hard to think for ourselves, while it is much easier to listen to what others have seen or heard and then make a decision. It is also lazy. Listen with an active mind. Actually, it might be better not to listen at all. Above all, though, weigh the evidence. It is not of the realm of possibility to be lied to.
By the way, what really happened is that the boyfriend and girlfriend mutually decided to break up because he kept leaving his shoes in the living room and she never refilled the ice trays. He started dating a friend of the old girlfriend, who had at one time borrowed a skirt from the old girlfriend. At a party they were all at, the old girlfriend asked for the skirt back, but the new girlfriend said no. They slapped each other a bit, and there were three angry text messages. The old girlfriend did eventually get the skirt back from the new girlfriend, and it's all good now.
At least that's what I heard.
"That's a nice story, but what really happened is that the original girlfriend broke up with the guy when she found out he was cheating on her. The new girlfriend is the one that started calling the old girlfriend to threaten to beat her up. Now the old girlfriend has a restraining order against both the boyfriend and the new girlfriend. You know that the boyfriend has a gun; when he sees the old girlfriend, it's over for her."
Gossip runs rampant in most social settings. This is not new, but a new study that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals individuals sometimes place so much stock in gossip that they accept it as true even if their own observations and experiences suggest otherwise.
"Gossip has a strong manipulative potential that could be used by cheaters to change the reputation of others or even change their own," lead author Ralf Sommerfeld of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology and his colleagues writes. "This finding suggests that humans are used to basing their decisions on gossip, rumors or other spoken information."
The experiment involved putting people in a situation where they were presented with gossip and actual facts. The findings were that people still responded to the gossip.
"If people would act rationally, they would only base their decisions on what they really see because they know exactly the past behavior of these people," Sommerfeld said. "But they were still influenced by this gossip."
We all know we do something like this every day. It is so hard to think for ourselves, while it is much easier to listen to what others have seen or heard and then make a decision. It is also lazy. Listen with an active mind. Actually, it might be better not to listen at all. Above all, though, weigh the evidence. It is not of the realm of possibility to be lied to.
By the way, what really happened is that the boyfriend and girlfriend mutually decided to break up because he kept leaving his shoes in the living room and she never refilled the ice trays. He started dating a friend of the old girlfriend, who had at one time borrowed a skirt from the old girlfriend. At a party they were all at, the old girlfriend asked for the skirt back, but the new girlfriend said no. They slapped each other a bit, and there were three angry text messages. The old girlfriend did eventually get the skirt back from the new girlfriend, and it's all good now.
At least that's what I heard.
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