Gossiping represents a pervasive behavior in modern life. It has been estimated that more than two thirds of people daily conversations involve interpersonal comments or proper gossip. Rumors have been spreading since the early antiquity: in fact, the earliest gossip was inscribed on a cuneiform tablet (1500 B.C.), where an affair between a married woman and a powerful Mesopotamian man is recorded (Wilkes, 2002).

Despite its diffusion and persistence, gossip has a somewhat bad reputation, even if the term in itself is actually neutral: in fact gossip can be defined as a positive or negative comment about someone who is not present (Foster, 2004). The term derives from Late Old English godsibb, which literally means “a person related to one in God” (from god“God” and sib, “relative”), while in Middle English it had the sense of “a close friend, someone with whom one gossips”, then “a person who gossips”. The term originates from the bedroom at the time of childbirth. Giving birth used to be a social event exclusively attended by women. The pregnant woman’s female relatives and neighbours would congregate and idly converse. In the 16th century, the word assumed the meaning of a person, mostly a woman, one who delights in idle talk. The verb to gossip, meaning “to be a gossip”, first appears in Shakespeare.

The potential causes of the evolutionary persistence of gossiping have been connected to its social functions:

  • establishing group rules
  • punishing trespassers
  • exercising social influence through reputational systems
  • developing and strengthening social bonds, sharing interests and values
  • a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information

Thus, we could be argued that gossip plays a relevant role in creating and modulating human social relationships, making society possible .

At the same time, some scientists have pointed the potential violence of gossip in the workplace, noting that it can be “a form of attack.” Gossip is thought by many to “empower one person while disempowering another. Indeed. many companies have formal policies in their employee handbooks against gossip.

Natascia Bondino and coworkers (Psychoneuroendocrinology, March 2017) recruited 22 women, belonging to a sorority of the University of Pavia, Italy. They measured in those women the levels of oxytocin during neutral conversation and during gossiping. They found that, during gossiping, oxytocin increases significantly.

Among potential hormonal candidates, they chose oxytocin owing to its key role in social behavior. In fact, oxytocin has been implicated in several human social behaviors, such as mother-infant bonding mind-reading, and empathy as well as memory for facial expression compared to non-social stimuli. In the context of human relationships, OT is involved in parochial altruism, that is in-group, but not out-group cooperation.