Gossip - More Important Than Facts in Shaping Your Image

You may be an intelligent and mature person, who does not take into account subjective facts. And who also tends to believe that the others have the same logical reasoning. That's why you can be really amazed when your superiors scold you for things that you don't really consider to be 'wrong'. This is because, in fact, what people think about you is not the result of knowing you directly (have your superiors called you to clarify any issue?), but rather the outcome of gossip. And gossip, by definition, is subjective.

A new German research has discovered that gossip is more important in molding a person's opinion than real facts are, which they know to be true, and even if the chitchat contradicts the evidence (this is how - from mature and intelligent - you get childish and stupid). To check the role of gossip, the German team made an experiment where 126 undergraduate students played a series of computer-based games with anonymous partners or adversaries. The subjects received a pot of 10 Euro ($14) and had to choose whether they wanted to give their "partners" a fixed donation (1.25 Euro, $1.75) or keep the money.

In later rounds, the subjects received notes about how generous (or not) their adversaries had behaved previously. Those who read positive feedback about their adversaries were more likely to reward them with donations, thus the group consensus (gossip) strongly influenced their decisions.

In a final round, the subjects received a list of their partner's decisions in the most recent rounds, but many were false, contradicting the reality. Surprisingly, the students' decisions were influenced by gossip rather than by what was clear proof. "People are unduly influenced by gossip, even if it contradicts what they have seen," said Ralf Sommerfeld, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany. "People tend to place a certain stock in gossip because culturally it has evolved as a useful information-gathering tool." said Sommerfeld.

People "are used to basing their decisions on gossip, rumors, or other spoken information. Such a strategy could be successful in an environment where direct observation is potentially less common than indirect information about others.", wrote the researchers.

Individuals receive a lot of information indirectly (through gossip) from various sources. "The resulting picture of any person with whom the individual is in social contact would be much more refined than the picture based on the small amount of direct observation of these people."