As Oscar Wilde once put it: “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Everybody gossips, and to say they don’t is a lie. Everybody at some time in their lives has indulged in idle banter about someone else. Everybody has at some stage gossiped about a person they know or in some cases, someone they hardly know – someone at work, a family member, a celebrity… gossip really does make the world go round.
And Greek’s have made gossiping a national sport in itself. From sticking your head over the neighbour’s fence for a chat about another villager, to gossiping about the in-laws, Greeks tend to take pride in how much they can utter about another person in the time it takes them to drink a sketo kafe. But why do we all shun when spotted in the act of gossiping? We are always quick to say “I wasn’t talking about !” when caught in the act.
Gossip, throughout the years, has been given a bad rap. In our society, we look at people who gossip, to a certain degree, as troublemakers – people who like to create rumours. Gossip is frowned upon as it can damage someone’s reputation, being generally used to talk about something personal, sensational, or intimate of nature. We tend to look at the bad side of gossip as an evil – as idle chatter that can harm people’s reputations. But what if gossip was a necessary evil?
A new study from the University of Berkley, in the United States, has found that gossiping can actually be good for your health. Gossip has been found to reduce stress, to discourage bad behaviour and can ensure people don’t get exploited or taken advantage of. Gossip can also be a therapeutic exercise. If you are harbouring a secret or know someone is up to no good, talking about it can reduce stress levels and decrease faster heart rates.
Historically, gossip started when childbirth was very much a female affair. Midwives and female friends who would accompany the expectant mother were known as gossips. The gossips would lock themselves away with the pregnant woman till childbirth and would fill the days with idle chit-chat. Men would fear what was being said in the birth chamber, a secretive domain where they could only imagine what was being said, or more specifically what was being said about them. Since then, the female connection to gossip has grown: to the point that magazines today have been targeted primarily to females and their love for conversation about personal details of other peoples’ lives.
But what we always have to remember is that there can be two kinds of gossip – positive and negative gossip and neither is as bad as each other. All gossip is a form of venting, regardless of the content of what it is you are saying, and it’s this style of venting that has proven to have beneficial effects on your health. “Gossip gets a bad rap, but we’re finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, co-author of the study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The four experiments conducted by researchers showed that when someone acts immoral, cheats or is selfish, the volunteers in the study became frustrated and saw their heart rates increase. It was only when they were offered the choice of gossiping about the person, that their heart rates became normal again, and they felt relieved. “When we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated,” Willer said. “But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better.”
Office gossip on one hand can be a great way to vent about colleagues, but can also be detrimental when it starts impacting on someone’s career. The best way to handle office gossip is to stay away from it all. Although a lot is said about people you work with by the water cooler, at the end of the day, do you really want to know who so-and-so from HR may or may not have bonked? If you have forged a friendship in the workplace then by all means vent on your own watch, but don’t bring it to work as, gossip, out of safe hands can be a potential career ender.
But what it really comes down to, is our own moral compass, what we think is acceptable or not. The old adage “treat other’s as you would like to be treated” couldn’t be more true than when it comes to gossip. If you are saying something about someone, about their personal lives that you would loathe to be said about you, then why do it yourself? If you are engaging in negative gossip that can harm someone’s reputation, that could damage their relationships and their careers, then that should be obvious enough that gossiping in that sense isn’t really going to make you feel better, because after all that’s said and done, you need to live with yourself and what you’ve done and said.
