Scientists from the University of California in Berkeley have claimed that gossip can be good for individuals and wider society. In a series of detailed experiments they found that people are more likely to engage in gossip if they are helping to control bad behaviour, prevent someone from being exploited and that gossip can even lower stress the Daily Mail reported.

The study which focused on chatter known as ‘pro-social’ gossip involved people cheating at games. In the first experiment volunteers were hooked up to heart rate monitors as they checked the scores of two people playing a card game. After a couple of rounds, they could see that one player was cheating. Those participants who noticed experienced a spike in their heart rates, but when they sent notes to others about the cheating, their heart rates dropped.

“Passing on the gossip note ameliorated their negative feelings and tempered their frustration. When we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated. Gossiping made them feel better,” said Robb Willer, a Social Psychologist and Co-author of the study. “Gossip gets a bad rap but we’re finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order.”

In the second experiment, 111 volunteers filled out questionnaires about their level of altruism and cooperativeness. They then observed monitors showing the scores from three rounds of card games, and saw that one player was cheating.

The more ‘pro-social’ observers reported feeling frustrated by the betrayal and then relieved to be given a chance to pass a note to the next player to prevent them being exploited.

In observing the results Matthew Feinberg, a Social Psychologist and Lead Author of the paper said “a central reason for engaging in gossip was to help others out – more so than just to talk trash about the selfish individual”.

“Also, the higher participants scored on being altruistic, the more likely they were to experience negative emotions after witnessing the selfish behavior and the more likely they were to engage in the gossip. We shouldn’t feel guilty for gossiping if the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of.”

Dr Laura Davies, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, said the UC Berkeley study focused on a specific kind of gossip that many people don't consider gossip.

Whilst acknowledging that conducting a real-life gossip experiment would be challenging, she still claims "the scenarios the researchers used didn’t fairly represent gossip and the complex dynamics between 'selfish' and 'altruistic' people. "This study is incredibly limited and purports to answer a lot more than it actually does and should be taken with a huge grain of salt," said Dr Davies

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