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In the cutthroat world of the elementary school playground, one bad rumor is enough to make kids wary of another, new research suggests.
Psychologists who studied gossip in seven-year-old children found that children trust good rumors when they come from multiple sources, but can be swayed by bad rumors they’ve heard only once.
What’s behind the kids’ decisions isn’t clear, but the researchers said the finding may reflect the risk of being tricked into befriending a classmate only to find out the hard way that they’re terrible brats.
“It may be functionally adaptive for children to adjust their behavior based on negative gossip simply to avoid harmful situations caused by future interactions with a malicious person,” the authors wrote in Royal Society Open Science. “They can be exploited or hurt by someone who is actually malicious.”
For the purpose of the study, 108 seven-year-old children in Japan watched a series of short videos featuring a pair of puppet characters, one wearing a plaid shirt, the other dressed in polka dots to make them easy to recognize.
After appearing, each puppet disappeared from the screen, passing from one to five other puppets, who duly became informers, sharing good, bad or neutral gossip with the viewer.
Positive gossip describes kind actions such as sharing sweets or helping someone in need, while negative gossip includes accusations of stealing, hitting or breaking toys. In neutral gossip, it is said that the character painted a picture, went for a walk or played on the swing.
When the videos ended, the children were asked to give prizes in the form of stickers to the main characters. Researchers from Osaka University and NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto found that children were more generous when multiple informants shared positive gossip. But hearing even one bad rumor was enough to reach the prizes the children handed out.
“Children acted on positive gossip from multiple informants, but not from a single informant,” the authors wrote. “Instead, they relied on negative gossip, regardless of the number of sources.”
Kirk Chang, Professor of Human Resource Management and Technology at the University of East London and an expert on workplace gossipsaid that negative gossip can have more meaning for young children, especially before they develop the skills to make good risk assessments and make decisions.
“If the experiment was replicated with mature participants, such as 30- to 40-year-olds with professional experience, the result might be completely different,” he said.
Kim Peters, Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Exeter and a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on trust and gossipsaid that people are generally more sensitive to negative character information.
“To put this in everyday terms, we would expect even the worst people to be nice to some people at some times,” she said. “This means that bad behavior is likely to be more informative than good behavior and should therefore have a greater impact on us.”
Peters added: “How seriously we take the information we receive in gossip and how much it shapes our behavior will depend largely on our history of interaction with the gossiper.
“It’s possible that we’re generally more skeptical of negative gossip because it may say more about the gossiper’s need to vent than about the person they’re venting about. All this means that in most day-to-day circumstances we will not rush to judge and will be ready to update our impressions as additional information comes in.”
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