Psychology News
Researchers at the University of Konstanz, Germany, showed how social curiosity and gossip are related. The study is published in PLOS ONE.
The Study
The researchers invited 370 participants, aged 16–77 years, from English- and German-speaking countries to answer online questionnaires and respond to certain psychological scales. These include the Social Curiosity Scale (SCS), the Epistemic Curiosity Inventory (EC), the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI), etc. They examined factors like perspectives of self, trait conceptions, the need for social knowledge, the social function of gossip, etc.
The Findings
The results provided interesting insights into two fundamental human social behaviors, namely, social curiosity and gossip. It is found that “the needs for gathering and disseminating social information might represent two interlinked but different drives of cultural learning”.
However, interpersonal curiosity is moderately related to the tendency to gossip. It is also seen that most people tend to think that the social functions of gossip are entertainment and social curiosity that enriches social interaction.
To Know More You May Refer To
Hartung, F. M., & Renner, B. (2013). Social curiosity and gossip: related but different drives of social functioning. PloS one, 8(7), e69996. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0069996
