Gossip Girl! Children from the age of seven enjoy gossiping – and can be seduced by a single negative rumor, research shows

Science
By William
  • Children were shown videos of dolls sharing good, neutral or bad gossip
  • A single piece of negative gossip was enough to make them make a decision

By Xantha Leatham, deputy science editor of The Daily Mail

Published: | Updated:

Playgrounds are usually a place for fun and games.

But children are gossips and can easily be influenced by negative rumors, new research shows.

The study involved a group of 108 seven-year-old children who were shown videos of dolls sharing positive, neutral or negative gossip.

Negative gossip includes that someone broke or stole a peer’s toy, hit someone, or left someone out.

Meanwhile, positive gossip included that the person had shared toys, helped a peer in trouble, and helped a peer clean a room.

Playgrounds are usually a place for fun and games. But children are gossips and can easily be influenced by negative rumors, new research shows (stock image)

The children were then asked to give sticker rewards to a separate group that the puppets in the video were talking about.

Analysis showed that hearing positive gossip from just one source was not enough to determine who they gave the stickers to, but positive gossip from multiple informants was.

However, a single negative gossip was enough to make them decide not to give that person a sticker.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team from the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, wrote: ‘Gossip allows individuals to effectively acquire information about who is good or bad in their social group.

‘Gossip is influential information even for children. However, individuals should be careful when relying on the information provided by gossip because it can be manipulated or biased.

‘Some like to share false or exaggerated gossip. For example, people tend to share positive gossip about a friend to improve their status, while they spread negative gossip about an enemy to damage their reputation.

The study involved a group of 108 seven-year-old children who were shown videos of dolls sharing positive, neutral or negative gossip (stock image)

The study involved a group of 108 seven-year-old children who were shown videos of dolls sharing positive, neutral or negative gossip (stock image)

‘(In our study), the seven-year-olds assigned rewards based on positive gossip from multiple informants and did not rely on gossip from a single informant.

‘Instead, they relied on negative gossip, regardless of the number of informants.

‘Our results contribute to a better understanding of how children expand their social world by showing that they selectively interact with others through gossip.’

Previous research has shown that women who gossip about others are driven by jealousy and low self-esteem.

Researchers from Beijing Normal University found that young women gossip to win opportunities for themselves when facing physically attractive romantic competitors.

They also found that women with more romantic jealousy were more likely to spread negative information that could damage competitors’ sexual reputations.

Do men gossip as much as women?

A shocking recent study found that men gossip just as much as women.

And instead of acting like gentlemen, they are more likely than their female counterparts to talk about co-workers.

Researchers surveyed more than 2,200 people about their gossip habits and found that men and women are equally likely to engage in office banter.

But while women tend to talk supportively about colleagues, men try to put down rivals.

The researchers suggested that gossip gave women a way to compete in a non-physically threatening way, while for men it helped build their self-confidence.

In the study, published in March and conducted by Ariel University in Israel, participants were asked to imagine describing a person they had just met to a friend, and the responses were analyzed.

The authors concluded: ‘Our findings suggest that women and men engage in gossip to the same extent, undermining annoying, common stereotypes.

‘The results indicated a statistically significant difference between the sexes, confirming that women’s gossip is coded with more positivity than men’s.’

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