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.

Part of the problem is definitional. When people hear the word “gossip,” they picture the worst version of it: lies spread to destroy someone’s reputation and rumors wielded like weapons. But the working definition most researchers use is far broader and more ordinary: Gossip is simply talking about someone who isn’t present, McAndrew says. No malice required; no salacious content necessary.

McAndrew stumbled into this research territory about 25 years ago, in a moment that was equal parts mundane and revelatory. He was stuck in a grocery store checkout line that wasn’t moving, stalled directly in front of a rack of tabloid magazines. He’d never paid them much attention before, but standing there, he started to wonder: How do all these publications stay in business? Who reads them, and why do people care so much about strangers they’ll never meet? Being a good academic, he went looking for existing research on the topic—and was stunned to find that very little existed. So he decided to change that.

Born to gossip

What McAndrew and other researchers have since found is that gossiping isn’t just something humans happen to do—it’s something we were shaped by evolution to do. “I’m an evolutionary psychologist,” he says, “so I really think our caveman brains were shaped through most of our years of evolution to be the way we had to be to be successful.” In the world our ancestors inhabited—small groups of under 150 people, living and dying together—knowing who could be trusted, who was sleeping with whom, and who had powerful allies wasn’t idle curiosity. It was survival.

Matthew Feinberg, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has studied gossip’s role in cooperation and group dynamics. He points to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who’s argued that one of the key reasons language evolved in our early ancestors was to facilitate exactly this kind of information-sharing. Without gossip, the theory goes, group living would have been nearly impossible. You couldn’t trust each other without knowing each other’s reputations, and in a group too large to personally observe everyone all the time, talk was the only way to know. “Back then, ostracism from the group was basically a death sentence,” Feinberg says. “So you definitely didn’t want that.”

None of that ancient wiring has gone away. We are, as McAndrew puts it, “the descendants of busybodies.” That magnetic pull isn’t an accident: “Think about anything else in your life that’s irresistible—doughnuts, sex. Things that were essential to our reproductive survival were things we were driven to enjoy,” he says. “You can’t leave it to chance. Gossip is the same thing.”

The case for the grapevine

So what does gossip actually do for us, beyond the obvious pleasure of it? Quite a lot, it turns out. One of its most important functions is building trust. Megan Robbins, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies everyday social interactions, explains it this way: Sharing sensitive information about someone who isn’t present is an act of vulnerability and trust. “Particularly with negative gossip, there’s a level of trust that you need and that you convey when you confide in someone that way,” she says. When you tell a friend something you wouldn’t want to travel far and wide, you’re implicitly saying: “I trust you with this.”

That alignment can also serve a subtler purpose, says Atalie Abramovici, a therapist in Los Angeles who works with individuals and couples. She thinks of gossip as one of the ways we quietly audition potential friends—figuring out if someone shares our values before we’ve fully committed to the relationship. “It can be a way to find people who align with your values and norms,” she says. “What’s acceptable behavior, and what’s not.”

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Robbins thinks gossip’s role in social learning may be one of its most underappreciated functions—and it’s something she understood intuitively long before she had the vocabulary for it. As a child, she remembers being a social kid who loved playing with other children, but when her parents had friends over, she didn’t want to go play. She wanted to stay at the dinner table with the adults and listen. “I just thought it was interesting to hear the stories,” she recalls. She wasn’t thinking of the back-and-forth banter as gossip. Yet now, as a researcher, she understands exactly what she was doing.

“I was listening for all these things: How are they talking about people when they’re telling these stories? Is this something they deemed virtuous, or wrong, or funny?” Gossip, she argues, is how we learn the rules of the social world without having to personally witness every violation of them. “Can you imagine if you had to observe everything to learn it?” she says. And it teaches us not just about the people being discussed, but about the person doing the discussing. “You’re also learning about the values of the person who’s gossiping with you,” she says, “because they’re implicitly communicating what they think is good, bad, or productive.”

Beyond social learning, gossip also functions as a kind of informal accountability system. McAndrew points out that knowing people are watching your reputation—and will talk if you step out of line—is a surprisingly powerful deterrent. “If you’re in the workplace and you’re tempted to slack off and let other people do your share of the work,” he says, “knowing that people are going to discuss that kind of shames you into doing the right thing.” 

Gossip can also serve a protective function within groups. Sharing information about a sexual predator, a thief, or someone who consistently betrays trust isn’t malicious—it’s a warning system. “Gossiping about that person to find out if this information is true or not is actually looking out for the good of the group,” McAndrew says.

The bonding power of gossip even shows up in couples therapy, Abramovici notes. She’s seen partners use gossip about other couples to find common ground—sometimes to reassure themselves (“at least we’re not like them”), and sometimes to articulate what they actually want. “They can say, ‘That couple tried this thing; maybe we should try it,’” she says. “Through that comparison, they can convey what they admire and what they want.”

Read More: The Secret to Stronger Friendships: Ask Better Questions

One of the most striking pieces of evidence that gossip has been misunderstood comes from Robbins’s own research. In a 2019 paper, her team tracked thousands of real-world conversations and analyzed their content. The overwhelming majority of gossip, it turned out, was neither positive nor negative. It was neutral—just people sharing information about other people who weren’t in the room. Someone got a new job; someone had a fourth kid; someone’s the person to go to when you have a tech question. Boring, essentially, but constant and ubiquitous.

The study also took a sledgehammer to some stubborn myths. The idea that gossip is a characteristically female behavior? Not supported by the data. “Men gossip,” Robbins says. “There’s just no two ways about that. The data show it.” The idea that gossip is low-class behavior, something successful people don’t engage in? Also debunked. As Robbins puts it: “You mean to tell me that you’ve never hired or fired anyone without talking about them first? It’s just not possible.”

The strongest individual trait that predicted more gossiping was extroversion—which, Robbins notes, makes sense, since extroversion is linked to greater enthusiasm for socializing.

Good gossip, bad gossip

None of this means all gossip is benign. Researchers are careful to distinguish between what McAndrew calls “good gossip” and “bad gossip.” The difference, he says, comes down to purpose. Good gossip serves the group—it warns, informs, and holds people accountable. Bad gossip serves only the person spreading it, usually at someone else’s expense. “If the purpose of the gossip is solely to destroy this other person’s reputation for no benefit to anybody else except yourself,” he says, “that’s negative.”

Feinberg frames it in more utilitarian terms: Think about the downstream consequences. If sharing a piece of information would deter future bad behavior or protect people from harm, it may serve a larger social function even if it stings the subject. If it would simply wound someone without any wider benefit, that’s worth pausing over.

Christie Ferrari, a clinical psychologist in Fairfax, Va., works with clients on both sides of the gossip equation—those who spread it and those who suffer from it. She offers a simple test: “If that person were here, would you still be sharing this?” She also distinguishes between gossip that’s about your own experience and gossip designed to plant doubt about someone else. “The good kind isn’t suggestive,” she says. “You’re not labeling anyone. It’s more about your personal experience—what should I do, what do you make of that, how do you read this.” The bad kind is when you’re trying to influence how someone is seen: “You’re saying, ‘Something’s wrong with her,’” she says. “‘Please confirm me.’”

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Abramovici puts it more simply: Ask yourself two questions before you share. “What is the intent, and what’s the impact?” she says. And consider whether you’re creating connection—or division.

The upshot, McAndrew argues, isn’t that we should gossip less—it’s that we should gossip better. “Gossip is a social skill,” he says. “It’s only when you do it badly that you get in trouble.” A skilled gossiper, in his eyes, is someone who knows what’s going on, but has a reputation for being discreet and responsible with that information. People trust what they say and trust them with what they share. That’s not a character flaw—it’s how human society has always worked.

And the next time someone tells you, with righteous fury, that they never gossip? You can tell them Frank McAndrew says hello.