Have You Heard the Latest?

Psychologist Sarah Wert, PhD, discovered a new research program during a sermon. Wert, a research associate at Yale University, was listening to a rabbi give a talk about the moral dangers of gossip when she realized that she'd never really considered gossip's moral implications before.

"As a social psychologist, I've always been interested in morality and moral decisions," Wert says. "And gossip is something that people make a moral decision about all the time: many times a day, every day." 

Now, Wert investigates what those everyday moral decisions add up to. She studies how factors such as people's moods and social standing influence the way they gossip, and the way that gossip can draw people together or pull them apart. She's one of many psychologists-mainly social psychologists-who have in the past decade or so begun to take a closer look at this most ubiquitous of human pastimes.  

They're finding that, contrary to popular opinion, gossip isn't always bad. Although it can be used to harm others (see "Whispers as weapons"), gossip is also the glue that binds social groups together (see "Bonding over others' business") and a valuable tool that helps people learn the rules of their social worlds (see "Learned it through the grapevine"). In fact, some psychologists suspect that, despite gossip's reputation for triviality, our need to chatter about one another in fact may be the evolutionary spur that pushed humanity to develop language (see "Bonding over others' business").