From the moment someone at a social gathering turns their back on us, alarm bells go off in the brain: we’ve become an outsider. It takes surprisingly little to trigger feelings of worthlessness and isolation.
That’s the starting point for a collaboration between psychologists in the United States and Germany, who set out to untangle a deceptively simple question: Would you rather be the subject of gossip, or be ignored altogether?
“When someone ostracises you…It makes you feel bad about yourself. It makes you feel momentarily meaningless,” says lead researcher Andrew Hales, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi.
“Gossip has a bad reputation for a reason: no one wants to be talked about behind their back, but at the same time, people don’t want to be ignored either,”. Hales says. “So, if your only options are being gossiped about or being seen as so insignificant that no one even mentions you, both feel negative, just in very different ways. This research set out to explore what happens when those two powerful social motives collide.”
Across five experiments involving more than 1,000 volunteers, the team asked participants to imagine themselves at a party. In the hypothetical, as guests departed, they became the subject of whisper-circles among the remaining attendees. Participants were asked: “Would you rather be talked about or not?”
Participants rated the degree to which they would prefer either not to be talked about, or to be talked about. To assess how much responses depend on the nature of the gossip, researchers randomly assigned people to one of the four scenarios: negative gossip, ambiguous gossip, no gossip, or positive gossip.
“People would rather be gossiped about positively than negatively,” Hales says. “But one thing that really surprised me is that within each of those, the preferences were not universal. About a third of participants said they didn’t want to be the focus of positive gossip. While the reasons aren’t fully clear, it’s possible they view positive gossip as potentially insincere or worry it could quickly turn negative.”
Even in the negative gossip scenario, a noticeable minority—15% overall – preferred to be talked about.
Digging deeper, the researchers identified two traits that strongly predict preference to be gossiped about, regardless of whether it is negative: gender and narcissism.
Men were consistently more likely than women to prefer being the subjects of gossip.
Narcissism – when a person has an unreasonably high sense of their own importance – significantly predicted greater openness to being the topic of gossip. Even in negative or ambiguous scenarios, narcissistic people were 10–15% more likely to say they’d prefer to be gossiped about.
“Narcissists often feel entitled and special, so they may believe gossip about them is positive, even if it’s clearly negative,” Hales says. “More likely, though, they prefer negative attention over being ignored altogether.”
The authors conclude, “Is it the case that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about? The answer likely is ‘it depends,’ as we find considerable variation based on situational as well as dispositional factors.”
These results are published in Self and Identity.
Gossiping and science
