IU study shows gossip can be both weapon, gift
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Rachel Krasnow |
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11:35 PM ON Nov. 9, 2009
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Gossip has long been established as a nasty form of lip venom, but a new study shows there’s more to this chatter than backstabbing.
IU sociology professors Tim Hallett and Donna Eder, as well as Brent Harger of Albright College, conducted a study on gossip that found how it works in a formal environment and how leaders cultivate interactions to generate respect, Hallett said.
The three professors collaborated on a paper named “Gossip at Work: Unsanctioned Evaluative Talk in Formal School Meetings,” which was published in the October issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
“In research, gossip has been defined in different sorts of ways,” Hallett said. “One of the ways it has been defined as saying things about people behind their backs. That’s a great definition for information context. When we took that definition and used it, it didn’t jive with what teachers were calling gossip.”
The study took two years, and the data was recorded at a Midwest elementary school, where a new principal had recently taken over.
Hallett said he spent his first year of research taking field notes and interviewing staff at the school individually. During the second year, 13 teacher meetings of about 40 minutes were taped. Videotaping was a central part of the paper, Hallett said.
“What I found was that the teachers themselves referred to what was going on in the meetings as gossip,” Hallett said. “One said to me after a meeting, ‘We could be done in 10 minutes if we weren’t gossiping.’”
The study built on previous studies on gossip, including one Eder helped conduct in 1991. Eder said she collected recordings of informal adolescent gossip that happened during school lunch breaks.
Eder said new findings from the videotapes show that the adults wanted to gossip but didn’t want to be held accountable.
“They knew gossip could easily be found,” Eder said. “More subtle, sophisticated strategies, not as direct – that was particularly interesting. They could avoid a negative tone.”
Hallett said the gossip was more indirect and more sarcastic and “veiled.” He said there tended to be indirect comparisons with the old and new principles.
Gossip tends to have a negative connotation, but Hallett said it is both a weapon and a gift.
“People think about gossip and assume it take a negative form,” Hallett said. “Those evaluations could be negative but also could be positive. We documented a number of positive evaluations. In both those cases, whether evaluations are positive or negative, giving a barometer of the person’s respect. If it’s negative, there’s a problem with respect. In terms of gossip, it can tell you about reputations.”
He said he hopes regular people can learn strategies to curb gossip from the paper.
“I can jump in with a positive comment,” Hallett said. “Alternatively, I could switch targets and I change the way gossip is going. If somebody uses sarcasm, you can very politically say, ‘Oh, well, what do you mean?’ If you force people to say what they mean, you can scare people off.”