Heard it through the grapevine

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 2, 2014

Is gossip always a bad thing, or can it be community-building? What does it indicate about our state of mind? Could it have to do with learning social intelligence?

Sermon: Gossip (Heard it Through the Grapevine)

So did you know that John Mayer’s been dating Katie Perry. He doesn’t have such a good track record in his dating relationships. None of them seems to work very long, and now there are rumors that he and Katy are having troubles. She seems to be doing fine, though. She just helped deliver a baby for a friend of hers in her friend’s apartment, so you can add delivering babies to her resume now.

The Oscars are tonight. I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk in Katmandu who loves to watch the Oscars. He can tell you which movie won Best Picture in 1987, who won best actress in 1995. Do you know that Brad Pitt has never won an Oscar? It looks like the red carpet is going to be soaked, with all this rain they’ve been having. What do you think Julia Roberts is going to wear?

Joan Didion says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices, We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album

My whole life I’ve heard that people shouldn’t gossip, that it’s trashy behavior. My father told me that the highest quality people talk about ideas, the middle quality people talk about events, and the lowest talk about other people. Byron Katie, who advocates falling in love with what is, would say “human beings gossip. We just do, that’s who we are. You’re living on earth, sweetheart, make yourself at home.”

Research on gossip is beginning to show that humans are fascinated by one another’s lives for evolutionary reasons.

In a Harvard U Press book called Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar says that gossip within our group, for humans, is a social bonding practice somewhat like grooming is for other primates. In the context of evolution, those who know what is going on make it and those who are oblivious don’t. The current theory is that our ancestors lived in small groups, and the people got to know one another in a face-to-face long-term way. You would want to know who would make fair exchanges with you and who would short-change you, who would give good value to a group and who would try to take a free ride, taking more than giving, who would come through for you in a crunch, who you could trust with your family’s safety? You would need to know about the temperament, past behavior and predictability of those in your group. This kind of social intelligence increased the odds of you and your family doing well.

People who pay close attention to others develop the capacity for determining and understanding the interpersonal connections between people insofar as their emotional intelligence will allow them. Some people are particularly talented at reading emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people, a skill that is sometimes called mind reading… Stephen Johnson, in his bookEverything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, says that watching reality shows is one way kids learn to see a social network as a series of points connected by lines of affiliation. “When we watch most reality shows, we are implicitly building these social network maps in our heads, a map not so much of plotlines as of attitudes: Nick has a thing for Amy, but Amy may just be using Nick; Bill and Kwame have a competitive friendship”. If they can see a social network, they are better suiting to building one for themselves.

Gossip can function as a training tool in the lives of groups. Every group has an unwritten contract: here are the things you do, the things you talk about, the things you let yourself notice. Here are the things we don’t talk about, the things we don’t notice, the things we never do. When someone breaks those unwritten rules, gossip can be a way of socially isolating that person, making them understand that they have broken the norms of the group, and giving them a chance to become better citizens. Sometimes gossip within groups helps to maintain the group’s mythos about itself, the group story. Everyone in this family is successful and sane, goes the myth in one family. Aunt Louise’s kids are messed up and she’s on tranquilizers because she married outside her faith. The last words are italicized, whispered. In this piece of gossip you get taught that it’s expected that we will not be messed up, and that we should marry other Methodists.

One book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. By Christopher Boehme, suggests that small groups of foragers were like teams in that the individuals did best when their group did best. Having some people who were over-dominant undermined the team, and gossip might have evolved as one way of leveling among the people. People would have a fascination with those who had the most power, and the visceral deliciousness of something bad happening to that person might have been a way of making the team more egalitarian. That guy who won the Nobel? Sleeping with his secretary, who also did all his writing for him. That child raising expert? His kids are in jail.

Gossip has been shown to:

1. Strengthen relationships between friends and work colleagues

2. Reinforce shared values –
We tell stories in order to live. We make sense out of what happens in life by telling stories. We figure out who we are, who we want to be… you have cautionary tales, you have success stories. You find out about the karma fairy. What happens to people when they get divorced? What is the way alcoholism works? What are some good ways to raise kids? What does it mean when you get a twitch that won’t go away? What might that mean?

3. Offer increased feelings of “connectedness” and community spirit.

4. Assist in controlling the poor behavior of others, particularly in an office situation

5. Offers a sense of status by being included in the “gossip circle”
Gossip can even help ward off grumpiness. Half an hour over coffee listening to the dilemmas of a third party can be enough to make you realize that things aren’t quite so bad in your own backyard after all. The feeling of belonging that comes from being in on the gossip circle gives us a feeling of belonging that boosts our self esteem and increases our sense of wellbeing. Gossiping about the lives of people who seem to have it all reinforces the idea that fate can deal a bad hand to anyone, despite beauty, money, and fame. Even Taylor Swift has trouble choosing a man. Even Martin Sheen has a son like Charlie. Turns out gossip can be bonding, it can be a teaching tool, it can be an enforcement tool for group norms. Bad gossip seems to be when a person uses it to undermine the group…when it’s hurting the community. Good gossip helps the community. In that it’s like any life skill. Be a good team player, be good for the community, and it’s positive.

So gossip well, and remember, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight? They never did get married. She said he was too controlling.

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