Exchange of social information and gossip was crucial to our Stone Age ancestors' survival.

Gossip identified whom to trust in life-or-death challenges of the ancient world.

Gossip strengthens bonds, enhances social learning, and shows how best to inform and persuade.

It was his first day on the job, and Rod was anxious at the staff meeting where his boss was about to introduce him. His gaze flitted around the conference room from one unfamiliar face to the next, trying to sense who looked trustworthy and who didn't, not that it would be that obvious. Rod had needed to leave his last job because of malicious gossip about his personal life, based upon the smallest grain of truth, that a kind-looking colleague he thought he could trust had spread.

Continuing to survey his new coworkers, it occurred to Rod that the faces around him might be new, but that these people, at their core, were probably the same as at his last job: a screeching echo chamber in which distortions and half-truths could destroy him. Or at least compel him to once again seek a new job.

As the meeting started and he mentally rehearsed a few words to introduce himself, he took in the room one last time, hoping against hope that this new group would be different, wondering, Just how much do these folks gossip?

How much do we gossip?

Rod was right that people are pretty much the same everywhere, and he could expect to be gossiped about. But exactly what percentage of our conversations are devoted to gossip?

If you’re like most people, you don’t like to think of yourself as a gossip, so your estimate of the percentage of your own conversations devoted to gossip is probably in the single-digit range, if not zero.

Yet research on casual conversations[1] reveals that more than 60 percent of informal conversations are gossip or the exchange of related “social information.” Dunbar[1] defines exchange of social information as conversations about people and relationships (e.g., who’s related to whom, who’s allied with whom, who’s married to whom), whereas a more narrowly defined subset of social conversations constitutes pure gossip, containing an element of judgment or evaluation of........

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