Freakonomics Radio - 152. Everybody Gossips (and That’s a Good Thing)

Episode Date: January 23, 2014

The benefits of rumor-mongering

Thomas Corley has made a habit, a career really, of studying the difference between rich people and poor people. 44% of the wealthy wake up three hours before work starts versus 3% for the poor. Corley is an accountant and a financial planner in New Jersey. He wrote a book called Rich Habits, The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals. He did five years worth of research. I interviewed 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. And when I was done, there was about 149 metrics that I followed or I tracked. By wealthy, Corley means annual income over $160,000 and net liquid assets of $3.2 million.

By poor, he means income less than $35,000 and net liquid assets of less than $5,000. There were a lot of differences between these two groups. Wealthy people spend 30 minutes or more every morning doing technical reading, some type of technical self-improvement reading. They also keep track of things. Oh, 81% of the wealthy maintain a to-do list versus 19% for the poor. Corley found that rich people exercise more and eat healthier. 97% of the poor people in my study ate more than 300 junk food calories a day.

70% of the wealthy ate less than 300 junk food calories a day. 70% of the wealthy ate less than 300 junk food calories per day. But you know what Corley found that really surprised him? It has to do with... Here, I'll give you a hint. Hey. Psst. Did you hear that? But I have a real piece of gossip that I always want to talk about.

I heard that she was pregnant. Everyone heard about it. And he tries to sleep with everyone at the post office. Okay, I really need to talk about the certain someone in our dance class. Yeah, please. I know exactly who it is. Do you really? Six percent of the wealthy gossip.

Compare that to 79 percent of the poor who gossip. This is one of those habits that really sticks out like that Grand Canyon of differences that I saw. This is one that really sends that message home that wealthy people and poor people do certain things differently on a daily basis. Gossip happens to From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Today's show is about gossip. It's about what gossip is or isn't.

It's about the characteristics of the people who produce it, consume it. It's about the functions of gossip. All of which sounds pretty scientific, yes? Well, let me lower your expectations. We came into this thinking we could answer these questions scientifically, and we will poke into what science there is on the topic. But honestly, there isn't much good science about gossip yet, which is sort of surprising considering how long gossip has been around, which, if we had to guess, is probably about as long as humans have been around. So let's start with the idea that we heard about a minute ago

from The Rich Habits author Tom Corley, who told us that the rich gossip much less than the poor. Now, how scientific is that? That's absolutely bullshit. There's no way that's true. This is the head of Gawker Media, an empire of gossip. I'm Nick Denton, former journalist for the Financial Times and The Economist. And I call myself publisher here. Yeah. I've always avoided the CEO title. Because why?

Because CEOs seem douchey. Gawker Media is headquartered in Alof, downtown Manhattan. Denton showed me around. So it's a little empty today. It's not all that big considering its reach. Roughly half a billion global page views a month for its eight websites. Gawker.com is one of the biggest, but there are others. Jezebel is there in the middle. Gizmodo over beyond it. Deadspin is there. And then we have a couple of sites, Ionine and Lifehacker, which are mainly written out of the West Coast.

It was the Gawker site Deadspin that broke the story about the football player Manti Teo getting lured into a fake online relationship with a woman. That post got 4.3 million views. All of the Gawker sites are gossipy, whether they cover sports or tech or actual gossip. The tagline for Gawker.com, today's gossip is tomorrow's news. I talked to two Gawker writers.

There's Katie. I'm Katie Weaver, and I'm a staff writer for Gawker.com. And Adrian. I'm Adrian Chen, and I am also a staff writer at Gawker. Adrian Chen, by the way, has left Gawker since we interviewed him. So you cover more what? I do more celebrity gossipy things. Right.

And what do you cover? I cover a lot of technology and privacy issues, hackers, kind of, you know, the digital underground. Let me ask you this. Do you call what you do gossip then as well? I mean, Katie was quite explicit, celebrity gossip and so on. Do you think of your work in the same way or no? Yeah, I think that a lot of what I'm reporting on is gossip. And I usually look at gossip as, you know, what people are talking about. You know, it is just kind of the general, you know, zeitgeist. And it's really easy with Twitter and with message boards and

everything, which is where a lot of my subjects are on all the time to kind of see what's going on and just pick out, you know, what is the kind of key information that people are talking about. There's something very, you know, valuable feeling about giving someone gossip, right? Like if you could walk in and tell your CEO something that they didn't know, they're going to say, Ooh, so what's that like to be a, you know, a purveyor and a, you know, receiver. My friends and family never give me tips. I mean, my mom is a podiatrist in Pennsylvania. She's not really getting that many hot tips. But I will say they treat me as sort of, and I don't mind this at all, an encyclopedia.

Like they just say, I heard something Beyonce. And then they expect me to kind of go. And I, you know, jump up, I'll tell you. So in that way, it's kind of comforting because our job is not real. This is a ludicrous profession. But it's nice that people can kind of rely on you for something. And my something is giving you all the Beyonce gossip. So if we just say a name and we can press the Katie button and Katie will.

Exactly. Who do we want to? Jon Hamm. I don't. Can we go a little blue? Okay, let me warn you. Katie is about to get a little bit blue here. So if you are sensitive to discussions about the male anatomy,

you might want to skip ahead a bit. Okay, back to John Hamm. He has a huge D. We've read that. That's the thing about John Hamm. Can we read that here? Yes. This conversation about John Hamm's anatomy went on for a while.

He's got a big... I don't know. Can we read that here? Yes. This conversation about Jon Hamm's anatomy went on for a while. Got a big ****. I don't know. Katie Weaver's post on this topic, which was headlined, Jon Hamm's penis takes its owner out for a walk, got nearly a million page views. And who is consuming all this gossip? If you look at Gawker's numbers from Quantcast, which measures digital audiences, the typical Gawker consumer is highly educated, between 25 and 34 years old, makes between $50,000, fishwives, well, it doesn't seem to be remotely true. And, according to Denton, it misses the point. You know, James Baker, it turned out, I think after he left office, it turned out that he actually had, I think, seven hours a week that was allocated to private press briefings.

Was it with Reston, the New York Times? I think it was his favorite. Yeah. that was allocated to private press briefings. Was it with Reston in the New York Times? I think it was his favorite. But he had others. And here's somebody at the very, very pinnacle. And it's surprising how often you find this, the people who are actually at the very, very pinnacle. The gossips are not two levels down.

The gossips are at the very, very top. And the real power players, they know how to use, this isn't wealth, this is power. But there is a correlation between wealth and power. But the people who are actually at the pinnacle of power in business and in politics, gossips are overrepresented among them. Look at all the people talking to Woodward. I'm always astonished by, when I come across somebody who actually doesn't use gossip as a tool in their corporate infighting. They're railing against some boss and how awful that boss is. And I'm asking them, well, why didn't you, if the behavior is that bad, surely it's bad enough to have been manifested in some group email, an email to enough people that it would be hard to detect where it came from.

And you could kill them right there, right then. And you're shocked that people don't do that? I am shocked. I'm shocked when they don't do it. It seems irrational. You have a problem. You have a means for its solution. Use the means. Well, of course that would seem irrational to you, doing Gawker, running Gawker, right?

You can imagine that someone has a totally different set of instincts, right? Who doesn't have an instinct to get rid of an awful boss? A boss who's just making your life miserable. It's kind of like we recently did an episode on game theory and how Jane Austen was the original game theorist. And the argument was that the people who most need to engage game theory, be good at it, are people who have less power. Because if you have power and leverage, you need to strategize and get your way. But maybe the only way you got power and leverage in the first place was by being gossip.

It was by using information. Well, I guess that's the question. If indeed gossip is more prevalent among lower income people. Again, let's say it is for a moment for the sake of argument. One could be that as a currency, it's very valuable for climbing or trying to climb. And two could be something counter, which is just pure schadenfreude. You know, I think it is.

I think what it is is that people define the lower class people are more associated with gossip is simply a matter of class prejudice. It's basically saying that the things that they talk about, the people that they talk about aren't important. It doesn't meet the standard of news. So let's call it gossip. It's just fishwives, you know, it's fishwives chattering about their husbands or some infidelity. There's no difference between that and power gossip or money gossip, except that the people who decide what is news and what is gossip are the privileged people who look down

on lower class. Everybody consumes and produces gossip. That's Jenny Cole. My name's Jenny Cole. I'm a social psychology lecturer at Staffordshire University and my research interests are in gossip and communication. Well, so are mine today. Nick Denton makes the point that the difference between gossip and news is really a semantic difference. We wanted to talk to Jenny Cole about the difference between good gossip and bad gossip and how each of them makes us feel. So Cole, along with one of her students, Hannah Scrivener, did some experiments.

They started by showing people a photo of someone they didn't know. So in the first experiment, people were presented with a photo and just a really brief description of hobbies and demographic information. And they were asked to describe that person. So in essence, gossip is describing someone positively or negatively when they're not there. So we thought this is almost what gossip is about. If we boil gossip down to the essentials. And participants actually were quite willing to give descriptions of people they had no idea about.

We thought they'd complain about this and they seemed to be quite happy to do it. And we found that when you gossip about someone or when you take part in this type of task where you're asked to describe someone in a positive way there's not much effect on how we feel about ourselves we're not that bothered whether we're saying something positive about someone or not so it doesn't make us feel better to praise someone in other words no it doesn't um but it does make us feel much worse if we criticize someone when they're not there. And this is even someone that we don't know, just someone we've been presented with in an experiment. OK, just to recap, saying something nice does nothing for us.

Saying something nasty makes us feel bad. Now, in the next experiment, Colram, she added another task. So I had another task in the second experiment, which was a bit closer to what you might think of as gossip. So people were asked to share with the experimenter in written form something positive or negative about someone that they knew. So almost like to tell a little story. So in each case, a subject was asked for either a positive or a negative. Is that the way you separated them out? Yes. So some of the participants were encouraged to tell us a little story about something that makes their acquaintance or friend that they're talking about look good. And half were asked to tell a little story about something that made their friend or acquaintance look bad.

And just so I'm clear, sorry. So the differences are A, you're being directed to either go positive or negative. Yep. And B, you're now describing to either go positive or negative. Yep. And B, you're now describing someone real that you actually know instead of some fake person whose picture you've seen. Absolutely. Okay. All right. All right. What do you find now? Well, now you find that regardless of whether the description is positive or negative, everyone feels bad, basically. Everyone feels bad if they talk about someone behind their back,

regardless of what they're saying. Okay. So in a nutshell, you find that if you ask a bunch of college students who come into a lab to describe someone they see for the first time in a picture, someone they don't know, you find that saying positive things about that person doesn't change their feelings about themselves, but it does make them feel worse if they say something negative. Yes, absolutely. When, however, you ask these same people to say something either positive or negative about someone that they actually do know, a real person, then they feel worse whether they say

something positive or negative. Yes. Now, you mentioned in the first leg, in the first portion of your study, where people are shown a picture and gossip about someone that they feel worse about themselves when they say something negative. If that's the case, is it irrational somehow to want to do that? Is it wrong? It's not the word I really want, but we'll stick with irrational. Is it irrational to do something of your own volition that makes you feel worse?

And if not, why? I think that's part of the reason why gossip is so fascinating, because we do it all the time. You know, estimates will vary about how much we do it. But it does seem sort of irrational. There's lots of studies that show that if you present someone with a person who gossips, and you ask that person how much they like them, then people don't like gossips very much. And also my research suggests that there might be a sort of personal disadvantage as well in terms of you don't feel very good about yourself. So it seems, if you don't look at it further, like gossip is an impossible human behavior. From what we've heard so far, there's not much good to say about gossip, is there? People don't like people who gossip.

When we do it, it makes us feel bad about ourselves. So it's tempting to just write off gossip as an inevitable and rotten byproduct of the human condition. But coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what if we told you that gossip serves some really useful functions like this? Beyond the social lubrication, I think there's another piece that's quite important, which is gossip is a warning device. And this. It's a great way for me to keep myself in check. You know, if you can, you know, with a grain of salt, look at what people are saying, and maybe there's some value there. She was like better.

Oh, no, we have to talk. Are we talking about the same person? I don't believe you. That drives me crazy. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Duffner. Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. Okay, so let's talk about, where do you work, Levitt?

I work at the University of Chicago. Which department? Department of Economics. When you are hanging out with your peers or maybe visiting scholars. What do you gossip about? What kind of gossip do you get in an econ department at University of Chicago, let's say? You know, we don't get very much of the good gossip. There's not a lot of lurid sexual stuff going on among economists. So more I think we gossip about who will or won't get tenure,

about the bad behavior of our colleagues. And believe me, there's a lot of bad behavior among academic economists. Details, please. Well, we wrote about one of the examples of bad behavior of economists that involved the cow manure, a Harvard professor, who was accused of stealing a bunch of manure. That wasn't so bad. Well, that's about as bad as it gets in economics. Okay, what Levitt is talking about is a Harvard economist who was accused of stealing a truckload of manure for his garden.

Not really a scandal by most measures. I had called Levitt to ask him about the economics of gossip. What he told me is that economists don't really know much about gossip, haven't even really come up with a good way to measure it. All right. How about then the psychologists? I'm Adam Grant, a Wharton professor and organizational psychologist. I study how relationships influence success and recent focuses on gossip. All right, Adam Grant, tell us this, for starters. Just how common is gossip?

How common is it? I think it's an interesting comparison with lying research. So Bella DiPaolo and her colleagues have estimated that the average person might tell three lies every ten minutes. And it wouldn't surprise me if gossip were equally common. And what function does all that gossip serve? Grant says it's a social lubricant for one, but that it's more than that. Pro-social gossip, as academics call it, has a more important function. Beyond the social lubrication, I think there's another piece

that's quite important, which is gossip is a warning device. It's a way that we can actually protect the people around us against the folks that I've come to call the takers, who are selfish and out for themselves. So let's go back to Enron, and let's look at what happened when Ken Lay decided to form Enron and had had a series of moments where he essentially stacked the Enron board with a bunch of his cronies and sort of buried a series of very selfish behaviors from his prior employer.

And then a number of people at Enron start to realize that this guy is all about himself. And they say nothing. They don't spread the word. They don't tell anybody else that this is somebody who doesn't have the company's best interests at heart, who's going to do some kind of harm or violence to shareholders and stakeholders. And of course, the company manages to swindle lots of people out of their jobs and others out of their life savings. I think in that case, I look at that and say, if somebody had been willing to step up earlier, whistleblowing is an extreme form of pro-social gossip. And that could have saved us

from Enron and many other situations like it. I guess the skeptic in me says, well, they're not willing to blow a whistle because their interests are tied with his at that point. If they know it's going to go down the hole, then of course they'd be more likely to. But at that point, they're thinking we're all on this profitable ride together and it wouldn't make any sense for me to put that forth. Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I think that's where, you know, the lack of gossip is basically at odds with what's good for the group. And if, you know, if we could cultivate a stronger level of concern for saying, look, let's try to make sure that everybody's best interests here are at heart, then we actually get somebody who's more likely to step up

and spread a little bit of pro-social gossip. Well, both rumor and gossip, this is one of the silver linings of any of the negative side effects of rumor is this detecting of cheaters, detecting of freeloaders, detecting of people who are harmful to the group in some way. That's Nicholas DiFonzo. He's a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

He studies rumor. And yes, there is an academic distinction between rumor and gossip. Although, for the purposes of this conversation, that's a distinction without a difference. And so if you have done something that's bad for your group, then that's one of the good functions of rumor and gossip is that your group will find out. DeFonzo says that paying attention to rumors and gossip is an excellent way to police a community. Well, the intelligence agencies classify one kind of intelligence as rumor. I believe the term is rumor int.

So they're very conscious of unverified information that's in circulation. Throughout history, especially during wartime, rumor and gossip have been used to gain an edge. Propaganda rumors, rumors that are purposely started for a strategic goal or military gain were used throughout World War II. We have declassified documents, manuals, written in part by Robert Knapp, who was a professor at that time. And he advised the Allies about how to spread rumors that would demoralize the German troops or confuse the Axis powers. Gossip and rumor are part of modern-day warfare, too. During the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein regularly used rumors. In fact, the weapons of mass destruction rumors that most people say got us into Iraq probably were started by Saddam Hussein in order to

make his enemies afraid and or by Iraqi expatriates who wanted to get back into Iraq and wanted the U.S. to become involved in Iraq. So that was a very successful rumor campaign. Yes, there was a rumor that we had a special ray that made Saddam Hussein talk. There's just lots of rumors about him. So there were some rumors that he was working on negotiating a special deal with the U.S., that he was already in captivity, but we were waiting to announce it so that it would fit our political cycle. That's Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Kelly. I'm an active duty Air Force officer. And obviously, anything I have to say is my own opinion.

I'm not speaking on behalf of the Air Force. But I'm here to talk about a thesis that I wrote when I was a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in 2004. The thesis was called Rumors in Iraq, a Guide to Winning Hearts and Minds. And so I was trying to compare these two counterinsurgency tactics, and I realized that I had no way of assessing the perception of the Iraqi people. Kelly came across a publication called The Baghdad Mosquito. It was published by American intelligence officials with the help of some Iraqis and Arab American translators. These folks would mine Iraqi news sources for the latest gossip and publish a column in English.

I think the column was entitled, What's the Word on the Street in Baghdad? So it was pretty obvious. Kelly saw this as a great resource. So I would get these publications every day and the weekly Baghdad mosquitoes that had the rumor section in that, I would pull those out and I would log each rumor into an Excel spreadsheet.

And then after looking at all of these rumors, I, you know, just certain categories became obvious. And then I would just go through and I categorized all the rumors by the broad subject, whether they were inciting hostility or fear, or if it was a positive spin, like a wish rumor, or if it was just relaying some generic information. And then basically, I just counted them. I categorized all the rumors. There was almost a thousand of them over a 10-month period. And they really ran the gamut of a lot of different subjects.

Some of the gossip was silly, even absurd. But not all of it. So there was some rumors that talked about threats against people that collaborated with the U.S. There was rumors about some of the crimes that were being committed, like people were being kidnapped. There was rumors just about what was going on with the formation of the transitional government. And then there were some interesting, kind of funny rumors, things like the United States Army was going to turn a mosque into an amusement park, or that when Saddam Hussein was captured, they used a sleeping agent to knock him out before they went in, and a sheep herder in nearby fields said his sheep fell asleep

for a week, and they didn't wake up, and that's how they knew this rumor was true, things like that. So there were some funny things, but there was also some rumors that were worrisome. So there were some that the soldiers were handing out candy to children that were poisoned or that they were purposefully going to Iraq and affecting the population with AIDS. So there was a lot of rumors that incited fear in the population and actually fomented like a divide between the Iraqi people and the U.S. forces. So what did Kelly conclude?

That gossip is a free and valuable resource that shouldn't be ignored. Paying attention to what people are saying, even if a lot of it seems like petty gossip or rumor, could have changed the way that American troops were perceived in Iraq. Now, unfortunately, much of what was reported in the Baghdad Mosquito was dismissed as idle chatter, kind of the way that we dismiss a lot of celebrity gossip in this country. Attention Entourage fans, it's official. Filming has finally started on the Entourage movie with new photos surfacing from the set in Miami. Adrian Grenier, who plays the lead role of Vincent Chase, has also been posting his own behind-the-scenes photos, including this one where he looks to be in possibly the best shape of his life. Well, we live in dichotomy, right? So I don't think gossip is purely bad.

Adrienne Grenier is a movie star and a TV star who played a movie star, Vincent Chase, in Entourage. It's not all good either if indulged too much, but it does serve its usefulness. It's a way for us to share ideas and through these stories of other people, through celebrity antics or missteps, we get to together share what we think is right or wrong and form moral judgments. And I think that can be a good thing. What's it like to be the subject of gossip? I mean, when you're in a show like Entourage, and you're a big star like you are, I'm guessing you hear and read things about you that may be wildly untrue and may be hurtful. What's that like?

I think a lot of actors and performers forget their role. They forget that they are, in fact, in the public eye because they are performers and they're vehicles for ideas. And I embrace it personally. I understand that that's what I chose to do is through acting and through the other things I do. I'm putting myself out there to create stories or tell stories that ultimately generate thought and put forth ideas. And it's really a service, a public service, and I really am a servant of the people. So people have the right to talk about me or talk about the things I've done. And I don't take it personally. You know, I have to say, I love that attitude and I find it refreshing and I find it something I've thought about a lot, which is that, yeah, the minute you get involved in any business or career or even hobby that you're asking for attention on one level, you're going to get attention on a number of levels and it's not up to you to decide who gets to, you know, you don't get to quarantine all that. But even so, I mean, are you really, so you sound incredibly easygoing about accepting the bad with the good.

Is it hard to do that? Or do you really kind of zen out on it and just say, yeah, people can say what they say because I've put myself in this arena? I think zen out is the right term because it is, I think, a spiritual thing. I'd consider myself a Buddhist above all spiritual practices. And really, contentment or happiness is really in the mind. So I don't really – I take everything outside in the outside world with a grain of salt, including gossip. And, but at the same time, you know, it's a great way for me to keep myself in check. You know, if you can, you know, with a grain of salt, look at what people are saying, and maybe there's some value there. Maybe, maybe I shouldn't have said that, or maybe

I can correct my behavior. And even looking at other celebrities and what they do or they don't do, it helps me sort of guide my own behavior. So there's some research that seems to indicate that people who gossip or when people gossip, afterwards they feel worse, their self-esteem falls. It seems like a thing of value to have. I have something that I'm going to tell other people and it will either titillate them or shock them or make them laugh and therefore I get something out of it. But it may be, and I put emphasis on the may, it may be that that activity, while it seems like it's going to bring me a benefit, actually costs me. Does that seem right to you or no? Well, what seems right to me is that maybe there's a momentary endorphin rush,

then you crash from that endorphin rush maybe. And you can't sustain happiness on that. I think ideas and creating value and being a servant to your community and connected to your friends and really creating value for the world is, I think, where you derive happiness. I guess I work in a kind of a sewing circle-esque place where we have lots of gossip. I think gossiping is really satisfying. It is. Gossiping can get you into trouble. Generally, if I hear gossip, it goes one in and out the other. I mean, you really bond and you're just like, oh, it's so much better. You get it out. Totally. I guess it's gossiping. For me, it's just sharing knowledge. So to Adrienne Grenier, gossip is a two-way street. Adrian Chen from Gawker, here's how he defined gossip.

I usually look at gossip as, you know, what people are talking about. And here's Jenny Cole from Staffordshire University. Gossip is describing someone positively or negatively when they're not there. And Adam Grant from Wharton. Beyond the social lubrication, I think there's another piece that's quite important, which is gossip is a warning device. And let's not forget Stephanie Kelly talking about gossip, or if you insist, rumor, in Iraq.

So there were some that the soldiers were handing out candy to children that were poisoned or that they were purposefully going to Iraq and affecting the population with AIDS. Isn't it strange that this one thing, gossip, can have so many different definitions? I guess that's one reason why our understanding of it isn't very scientific yet. But there's probably another reason, which is that for all the functions that gossip can serve, good and bad, we seem to have a cultural aversion to acknowledging that,

acknowledging the legitimacy and the power of it. That's also why most of us probably gossip a lot more than we think, a lot more than we'd admit. Remember what Adam Grant told us about the research on lying and gossip? Bella DiPaolo and her colleagues have estimated that the average person might tell three lies every 10 minutes.

And it wouldn't surprise me if gossip were equally common. So look at it this way. If you come right out and admit that you gossip, at least that's one less lie you'll be telling. Hey, podcast listeners, on next week's episode, good-looking people earn more and bad-looking people become criminals?

That makes sense because you can do better as an armed robber if you don't have to shoot people. You can just scare them by being ugly as hell. The economics of ugly. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Beret Lam, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with engineering help from Jim Briggs.

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