Gossip Can Be Good For You?

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Eshin Jolly doesn’t feel (too) bad about gossiping. Almost everyone does it, for one. And, says Jolly, a new assistant professor of psychology in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences, it actually has some real social value too. He doesn’t endorse maligning people, of course, or lying. But some kinds of gossip, he believes, help us find common ground with others and build relationships, increasing cooperation in a group.

Jolly specializes in computational social neuroscience. His innovative studies combine multiplayer experiments, inspired by popular games like Among Us and Mafia, with brain imaging techniques to explore how our brains respond to complex social situations.

Jolly earned his PhD at Dartmouth College and completed postdoctoral training at that university’s Consortium for Interacting Minds, where he and colleagues designed an online game to study gossip and what it does. Since joining UC San Diego in January 2025, he has been working on starting an interdisciplinary research lab in our Department of Psychology called Social Computations and Interacting Minds Research Studio, or “SciMinds” for short.

We sat down with him to learn more about why it is that gossip is so appealing.

Many people view gossip as taboo, but you’ve embraced it as an almost universal form of social connection. What are the benefits of gossiping?

Choosing to gossip is often spontaneous, and it occurs when people experience some sort of uncertainty in their social environment. Gossiping is a way to acquire information that can ease that uncertainty.

Gossiping is valuable because it gives us an opportunity to vicariously learn from others. We can experience things from other people’s point of view and share our own experiences. The process of doing this repeatedly over time is what builds trust, relationships, and social bonds.

It also allows us to negotiate our social norms, because we are having a conversation underneath the conversation. When you comment on someone’s behavior, you’re not just saying what they did, but you’re implicitly asking “Hey, do you think this is ok? Do you feel weird about this too?”

Sharing and learning something about the social world acts as a way for us to get on the same page about what that social world is.

Even trivial gossip has its place. What we choose to share — the fact that you told me about this particular celebrity scandal, say, and not this other thing — is already very informative. It helps us figure out if we have similar interests and values.

Gossip is a social tool, and like any tool you can wield it towards positive or negative outcomes. Gossip can sow chaos when it is untrue or shared with the intention to hurt or upset. But gossip is also really helpful for reducing chaos and uncertainty and confusion in the world around us, for ourselves and for other people.

Jolly’s research has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the NIH/National Institute of Mental Health.

To get involved with Jolly's new lab, please email: sciminds@ucsd.edu.