WE REMEMBER juicy gossip about our friends and acquaintances far more readily than more mundane details about their lives 鈥� which may explain why people become so addicted to gossipy media such as soap operas.
To find out whether gossip spreads through groups of people better than other information about them, UK-based researchers Alex Mesoudi and Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews and Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool used a method akin to 鈥淐hinese whispers鈥�.
They gave 10 people four different passages to read and then asked them to write down what they could remember. Their efforts were passed to another set of volunteers as passages for them to learn, and the process was repeated four times.
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The researchers then tried to tally the original passages with the final results. They found that gossip-like information involving deception and infidelity, and details involving general information about the interactions of third parties, were remembered and transmitted in greater quantity and with greater accuracy than purely descriptive information about individuals or their environment.
鈥淗umans are an intensely social species, and other people are a highly salient aspect of the environment in which we live and grow up,鈥� Mesoudi says. This makes the behaviours of others vitally important, which may explain why we are particularly adept at recalling such social information, he suggests.
The researchers say their findings, to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, also lend support to the idea that primate intelligence, especially human intelligence, originally evolved in response to social pressures rather than non-social demands such as finding food or using tools. 鈥淚f primate intelligence originally evolved to solve complex social problems, such as keeping track of shifting coalitions or countering against deception, then it鈥檚 possible that present-day human intelligence carries a legacy of this selection history, here expressed as a bias in memory for social information,鈥� says Mesoudi.
鈥淕ossip-like information involving deception and infidelity was remembered with greatest accuracy鈥�
Nick Emler of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, suggests the groups would have been even more adept at recalling the gossip had the experiment involved information about real people that the participants knew.
