On Saturday, NPR’s All Things Considered used a couple minutes of precious news time to air a conversation I had with my father about his chicken. They also aired me talking with my sister about my dad, with an old friend about why I haven’t called her, and with my best friend about fish we weren’t catching. You can listen to the audio here.
Why did All Things Considered consider this small talk worth broadcasting? Because according to Robin Dunbar’s “social brain” hypothesis, with small talk and gossip we build and analyze the relationships that make or break us as individuals and as a species.
What’s at stake when we gossip idly with our family and friends? In the NPR segment, I’m mining the conversations with siblings and friends (and in audio that didn’t air, some work contacts) not only for ‘hard’ information like how many chickens my father has or how much time I can have with the story I’m writing for the New York Times Magazine, but for vital information on how my dad is doing, how I stand in the affections and loyalties and priorities of my dad, my siblings, my best friends, and my editors, and how they stand within the realms in which they move. Gossip is content-rich.
And according to Dunbar, gossip didn’t evolve willy-nilly. It grew out of grooming — grooming as in picking fleas and such. (I like it that grooming roughly rhymes with schmoozing.) Nonhuman primates spend up to a fifth two-thirds of their time grooming one another. It’s how they form partnerships and alliances. Observing others grooming lets them evaluate other partnerships and alliances. Gossip helps us do the same thing. As I put it the first time I wrote about Dunbar, in an article about the genetic roots of sociability:
“The conventional view,” Dunbar notes in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,” “is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”
Dunbar’s assertion about the origin of language is controversial. But you needn’t agree with it to see that talk provides a far more powerful and efficient way to exchange social information than grooming does. In the social-brain theory’s broad definition, gossip means any conversation about social relationships: who did what to whom, who is what to whom, at every level, from family to work or school group to global politics. Defined this way, gossip accounts for about two-thirds of our conversation. All this yakking — murmured asides in the kitchen, gripefests in the office coffee room — yields vital data about changing alliances; shocking machinations; new, wished-for and missed opportunities; falling kings and rising stars; dangerous rivals and potential friends. These conversations tell us too what our gossipmates think about it all, and about us, all of which is crucial to maintaining our own alliances.
For we are all gossiped about, constantly evaluated by two criteria: Whether we can contribute, and whether we can be trusted. This reflects what Ralph Adolphs, a social neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the “complex and dynamic interplay between two opposing factors: on the one hand, groups can provide better security from predators, better mate choice and more reliable food; on the other hand, mates and food are available also to competitors from within the group.” You’re part of a team, but you’re competing with team members. Your teammates hope you’ll contribute skills and intergroup competitive spirit — without, however, offering too much competition within the group, or at least not cheating when you do. So, even if they like you, they constantly assess your trustworthiness. They know you can’t afford not to compete, and they worry you might do it sneakily.
Which helps explain why we invest so much time in what seems idle gossip: T’ain’t nothing idle about it.
Related:
- Don’t Believe Facebook, You Only Have 150 Friends, segment on Dunbar’s number in which I gossip with family and friends
- The Gregarious Brain, my New York Times Magazine feature on the genetic roots of sociability.
- Aleks Krotoski’s Guardian interview with Robin Dunbar
- Local & Distant Friendships – A Dunbar Number Conundrum
- Picking Robin Dunbar’s Brain: An Interview About Friends
- Robin Dunbar – all stories at Wired.com tagged with “Robin Dunbar”
