Noun: casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true: "he became the subject of much local gossip"
Verb: engage in gossip: "they would start gossiping about her as soon as she left"
Similar: spread rumours, spread gossip, circulate rumours, spread stories.
I had a fascinating conversation with my 22 year old son last night about what essentially boiled down to the influence of gossip. He was telling me about how he noticed that his impression of a new person, let’s call them Jeff, had been coloured by the negative opinion of a friend, let’s call her Nancy. Before my son met Jeff, his friend Nancy had told him her negative opinion of Jeff. My son noticed that when he met Jeff he was filtering his own experience of Jeff through the negative lens of Nancy. My son was reflecting with me on what his opinion of Jeff might have been without the influence of Nancy’s opinion. My son described this as an experience of social engineering and we went on to have a long conversation about how our realities are socially constructed and the pros and cons of hearing another person’s opinion on someone. He’s a very smart young man as you can tell!
My son and I thought together about why it was important for Nancy to tell him her perspective on Jeff? Was she genuinely trying to protect my son? To alert him to an issue with Jeff’s character, safety or reliability? That could be a fair reason to share a point of view on a person. I do think there is a place for tipping someone off about another person, based on facts and owned as our own perspective. Did Nancy have good intentions or was she trying to recruit my son to her perspective for some social advantage? We wondered what Nancy might be saying about my son to others, given that she found it so easy to say something negative about Jeff.
Let’s fact check the gossip we hear so we can course correct a rumour and take responsibility for our own judgements.
As this conversation was in the context of a negative opinion being shared, this got me thinking about the power of a whispered word and how easily we can accept a confidently expressed opinion as fact. I can think of times when I've allowed my own perspective of a person to be skewed by another, joined in with gossip or ignored my own red flags about a gossiper due their apparent confidence and charm. The gossiper's power is significant - think of Iago in Othello and of Machiavelli, the unscrupulous politician.
Much as it can be difficult to resist, we need to bring our personal discernment to negative gossip and fact check casual critical chat about other people’s character’s or organisations. Crucially we need to take a moment to think about the motivations of a person who is expressing negative opinions about someone else. What do they stand to gain from influencing someone else’s reputation?
Do you know someone who talks behind their hand or whose main form of social conversation is to say disparaging things behind people’s backs? People who build themselves up by knocking others down? A person who doesn't seem to have a good word to say about anyone? What does that tell you about them? More than the person they are talking about probably. What do you get from hanging out with them? It can feel like you are being included when someone gossips with you. It’s never fun to be the one being gossiped about.
So, let’s fact check the gossip we hear so we can course correct a rumour and take responsibility for our own judgements. Let's encourage the Nancy’s to tell the Jeff's directly if they have a problem with them rather than trying to turn other people against them. To quote a person well known for creating distortions himself, let’s not be part of the generation or maintenance of ‘fake news’.
