Gossip – Why do people like to talk about other people’s lives?

Discover the 4 main reasons why people talk (badly) about each other. Psychology explains why there is so much gossip.

Hello friends!

I live in a city in the interior of Minas Gerais since I was a child, with the exception of some periods away for study and work. My city, for you to have an idea, is one of the smallest in the country with only 57 km² and about 42 thousand inhabitants. I begin this text by giving this simple information because in smaller cities the tendency to gossip is evidently much greater.

Like in the Lars Von Trier film, dogville, it is as if the walls of the houses did not exist. It is as if the separation between the public and the private had not been built in the 17th and 18th centuries, that is, people pass through houses and know what happens inside, walls transparent for gossip.

The question we are going to address in this text is: Why do people like to talk about other people’s lives? Why is there so much interest in this?

Well, there are 4 main reasons that can be raised. As in psychology, each case will be different. Each person who gossips may have one of the reasons (or several reasons) that we clarify below.

1) Projection

Projection is a concept from Jung’s analytical psychology. Jung stated that unconscious psychic contents (unknown to consciousness) are projected outwards, onto others and onto things, onto objects.

An example cited in one of his books is quite interesting. A religious, in his long process to become a priest, had a great fixation on history and the figure of Judas. To the point of becoming obsessed with the problem of his salvation:

“Would Judas have been saved? Being a traitor, would he have had redemption in the afterlife? After all, his mistake (which he had led to the crucifixion) would also have led to the redemption of the sins of the world”…

And for a long time, the religious asked himself these questions. Until, finally, he abandoned religion and became “a traitor of Christ” himself.

Moral of the story: while not gossip, of course, this little story does give us a hint of one of the possible causes. The religious had a deep interest in the story of Judas because he projected his own questions onto his story. In other words, he was thinking that if he left the religion, he would be considered a traitor. And, if he was considered a traitor, whether he would have salvation.

So that their deepest internal issues were projected onto the other’s story. It was as if he experienced his dilemma by projecting it onto the story of Judas.

In Jung’s famous phrase, we can also understand the same principle: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.🇧🇷

2) Backbiting

A more terrible aspect of gossip is what we can call maledicence: liking to speak badly, to invent lies, to slander, to offend or denigrate. Although the reasons for this can be varied, it is quite likely that its root causes lie in aspects of rivalry. Rivalry that, deep down, ends up being related to the inferiority complex.

A person who is emotionally balanced has no need to speak ill of others. But someone who is feeling down may start to feel (in an illusory way) a little better by talking badly about another. It’s that tendency that we see so much of demeaning the other or the other to do better, to look good, to stand out.

A few days ago I published on our facebook page the following story of Gandhi:

When Gandhi was studying law at the University of London, he had a professor, Peters, who didn’t like him, but Gandhi didn’t lower his head. One day Prof. was eating in the cafeteria and they sat together.

The teacher said: – Mr. Gandhi, do you know that a pig and a bird don’t eat together?

– Ok, Professor I’m already flying and went to another table.

The bored teacher decides to take revenge on the next exam, but he answers all the questions brilliantly.

So you decide to ask the following question: – Mr. Gandhi, going Mr. down the street and finding a purse, he opens it and finds wisdom and a lot of money. Which one was it with?

– Of course with the money, Prof.!

– Oh! For I in your place would have wisdom.

– You’re right, Prof, each one would keep what they don’t have!

The furious professor wrote “IDIOT” on the test and handed it to him.

Gandhi received the proof, read it and returned:

– Prof. Mr. signed the test, but did not give the grade!

This small passage of Gandhi’s life gives us an excellent example that people who have some kind of rivalry or prejudice (like the teacher who probably didn’t like Gandhi because he was Indian), do everything to try to put other people in order. low. In the story, the teacher seeks to do this directly. In gossip, the same is done indirectly.

3) A taste for tragedy

A couple of years ago, we were traveling from São Lourenço to São José dos Campos by bus. In the middle of Dutra, there was an accident with a truck that overturned on the right side of the road. A gentleman who was in front of us kept saying, almost happy with the tragedy:

” – It just happened! It just happened! It just happened!”

It is common to criticize sensationalist and bloody newspapers for reporting only tragedies and disasters. But what we don’t always realize is that many, many people have a huge taste for tragedy, like this gentleman who seemed happy to witness an accident that just happened.

It is curious to know that negative news is not modern, it does not start with TV. Ever since Gutemberg invented the press, newspapers have already brought bizarre and bad news, because their producers knew that was what sold.

Returning to gossip, this questionable taste is also one of the sources to talk about others. There are no statistical surveys on the proportion of negative and positive news, but it is safe to say that negative news wins, even if it is half invented.

4) The human need to tell stories

Much gossip is fabrication. As that professional gossip says, “I raise, but I don’t invent.” I mean, he doesn’t tell you exactly how it was, he enlarges it a little, transforms it here and there, exaggerates at one point. However, the limit of increasing does not exist.

In children’s games, we learn how the “cordless phone” ends up completely transforming an original story. For example, a teenager appears with marks of hickeys on her neck and, a few hours later, it is said that she had been raped, that the aggressor was already being sought by the police and so on…

Here in Minas, we say that we like a story, telling a story, a joke. And this, I believe, is one of the reasons why people tell gossip. As human beings, we like to tell a story, a myth, a fantasy, the story of a movie, a soap opera.

If we are going to study a theory, we understand better through examples, right?

Conclusion

In the tabula smargardina, an ancient alchemical text that we also study in Jung’s analytical psychology, there is the idea that: “Everything is double, everything has two poles, everything has its opposite. Equal and unequal are the same thing. The extremes meet. All truths are half-truths. All paradoxes can be reconciled”.

This sentence, this absurd paradox, helps us understand the best sentence I’ve found about gossip. For ethically it is evident that gossip (looking at the reasons above) cannot be commended. However, like everything, it can give vent to self-knowledge. The phrase is: “Gossiping about others is certainly a defect, but it is a virtue when applied to oneself.”

Related