Study: Gossip Trumps Truth

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Jeanna Bryner

LiveScience Staff Writer

People are influenced by gossip about others, even when it contradicts what they see with their own eyes, suggests a new study.

Past research has found that gossip—those juicy tidbits of supposed fact we share about a third party—serves many purposes, including strengthening social ties, spreading social norms and helping others avoid double-crossers and other risky partners.

Hearsay can be the most reliable source of information about situations for which you have no experience. But when you hear gossip that's incongruent with a person or incident you are familiar with, you'd be smart to throw that chitchat out the window in favor of your own direct knowledge, right?

The new study, published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals individuals sometimes place so much stock in gossip that they accept it as true even if their own observations and experiences suggest otherwise.

"Gossip has a strong manipulative potential that could be used by cheaters to change the reputation of others or even change their own," lead author Ralf Sommerfeld of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology and his colleagues write. "This finding suggests that humans are used to basing their decisions on gossip, rumors or other spoken information."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/200710...ssiptrumpstruth

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Gossip makes the world go round