Come join us for an informal philosophical discussion. No prior knowledge or research is required, but an open mind is.
Gossip generally has a bad reputation. To gossip is to be petty and intrusive, and respectable people are supposed to mind their own business.
But perhaps gossip is one of the mechanisms that makes society work? For example, formal rules can punish misconduct only when someone knows about it and is willing to act. Meanwhile, informal reputation can do much more. Employees whispering to one another may discover that an abusive boss treats everyone the same way. Students comparing stories may expose a covert bully. Citizens exchanging forbidden stories may undermine a dictatorship that survives partly by keeping each person ignorant of what everyone else knows. Gossip can enforce good norms precisely because it spreads information outside official channels.
Moreover, there are further, less dramatic benefits of gossip. Sometimes gossip simply tells us useful things about other people: who needs help, who can be trusted, who knows something we need to know, or who might be especially well suited to solve a problem.
Yet the same machinery can enforce terrible norms rather than good ones. Gossip can punish harmless eccentricity, destroy reputations with false accusations, invade privacy, and turn suspicion into apparent fact. And as a story passes from person to person, like in a telephone game, it can mutate into something very different (and much more sensational) than what it originally was.
So when is gossip a social good? When does sharing information about someone become an unjustifiable violation of their privacy? And could a society without gossip function at all?
