Xantha Leatham, Deputy Science Editor, Daily Mail
00:01 May 15, 2024, updated 00:01 May 15, 2024
- Children were shown videos of the dolls and had to share good, neutral, and bad gossip.
- One negative rumor was enough to sway their decision.
A playground is usually a place for fun and games.
But new research shows that children love to gossip and can be easily swayed by negative rumors.
In this study, a group of 108 7-year-olds were shown videos of dolls sharing positive, neutral, or negative gossip.
Negative gossip included being told that someone broke or stole a friend’s toys, hit someone, or excluded someone.
On the other hand, positive rumors included that the person shared a toy, helped a peer in need, or helped a peer clean their room.
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The children were then asked to give a sticker “reward” to another group that the doll in the video was talking to.
Our analysis showed that hearing positive gossip from just one source was not enough to sway who gave the sticker, but positive gossip from multiple sources was. It became clear that
But one negative rumor was enough to make me decide not to give that person a sticker.
A research team from the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, wrote in the Royal Society Open Science journal: “Gossip allows individuals to effectively obtain information about who is good or bad in their social group.”
“Gossip is an influential piece of information for children, but individuals should be careful when trusting the information it provides, as it can be manipulated or biased.”
“Some people like to share gossip that is false or exaggerated. For example, people tend to share positive gossip about their friends to improve their status, but on the other hand, people tend to share positive gossip about their enemies. tend to spread negative gossip to damage one’s reputation.
‘[In our study] Seven-year-olds allocated rewards based on positive gossip from multiple informants and not on gossip from a single informant.
“In contrast, they relied on negative gossip regardless of the number of informants.
“Our findings contribute to a better understanding of how children expand their social worlds by showing that children selectively interact with others through gossip.” Masu.”
Previous research has shown that women who gossip about others are driven by jealousy and low self-esteem.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University found that when young women are faced with a physically attractive romantic rival, they gossip to win the chance.
They also found that women with higher levels of romantic jealousy were more likely to spread negative information that could damage a competitor’s sexual reputation.