Psychologists have found that negative gossip spreads much more easily among children than positive rumors, and elementary school playgrounds are more unforgiving than commonly thought. It could be something.
Researchers found that 7-year-olds were more likely to accept information that spoke negatively of a character after hearing it once.
In contrast, they accepted positive stories about someone’s behavior only after hearing them from several sources.
The researchers speculated that the tendency to believe bad things about people may be a kind of self-defense mechanism.
“It may be functionally adaptive for children to adjust their behavior based on negative gossip simply to avoid future harmful situations caused by interactions with malicious people. the authors wrote in Royal magazine. Social open science.
“It can be exploited and harmed by people with actual malicious intent.”
Researchers from Osaka University and NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto gathered 108 7-year-old children in Japan and asked them to watch short videos featuring doll characters.
After the doll left, the other dolls shared gossip about the departed character with the child audience. Positive gossip included acts of kindness such as sharing candy or helping someone in need, while negative gossip included accusations of stealing or hitting someone. I did.
At the end of the video, the children were asked to give a reward in the form of a sticker to the character who was the subject of the gossip. Children were more generous with the stickers when they heard good things about a particular character from multiple informants. In contrast, if he hears just one bad rumor, he is less likely to pass on the reward.
In their study, the researchers found that “children acted on positive gossip from multiple informants, but not on information from a single informant.” Stated. “On the contrary, they relied on negative gossip, regardless of the number of sources.”
Kim Peters, a professor at the University of Exeter who studies trust and gossip and was not involved in the current study, said previous research has shown that adults are generally more likely to be affected by negative information about a person’s personality. He said that it has been suggested that he is sensitive. “In this field, negative information is more diagnostic than positive information,” she said.
“Putting this in everyday language, you would expect some people to be nice to you sometimes, even the worst people. This means that bad behavior outweighs good behavior. This means that it is likely to be beneficial and therefore should have a large impact on our behavior.”
But adults also tend to consider the source of rumors, she added. “How seriously we take the information we receive through gossip, and the extent to which it influences our behavior, will largely depend on our history of interaction with the gossiper.” she says.
“We may also be more skeptical of negative gossip in general, because it has less to do with the person being gossiped about than with the gossiper’s emanations.” This can say a lot about necessity, which means that in most everyday situations we don’t rush to judgment and are willing to update our impressions as more information comes in. It means.”
