Brown University researchers discover how people gossip without getting caught

We sometimes do it in our sleep

By Gretchen Schrafft, Science Communications Specialist, Robert J. & Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University

Cognitive neuroscientists at Brown University investigated one of humanity’s favorite pastimes and discovered how people can spread gossip without the subject of that gossip finding out — at least not right away.

In a study supported by a federal grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers found that gossiping relies on a person’s ability to perform complex computational processes each time they decide to spread information, and that most people do this instinctively. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Brown University has been stripped of much of its federal research funding, so much so that it is imposing severe cost-cutting measures. As of June 30, Higher Ed reports that $45 million has not been paid to Brown by the National Institutes of Health for work already performed.  -  Will Collette

The researchers defined gossiping as talking about third parties who are not present. They found that people tend to gossip less with those who are friends with the subject of the gossip — especially if the subject is considered popular — and gossip the most with those who are popular yet distantly connected to the subject. 

Their findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour.

“We draw on two important factors when calculating who to share a morsel of gossip with: how popular the person is and how distantly connected they are to whoever the gossip is about,” said study author Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University who is affiliated with the Carney Institute for Brain Science. “This winning algorithm enables us to share information widely without the subject knowing that we’re talking about them.”

The power of these computations is evident in recent social phenomena, according to study author Alice Xia, a Ph.D. student in cognitive science at Brown. While humans rely on these calculations to predict where their gossip may end up, Xia said, the technology underpinning social media platforms likely capitalizes on similar computations to maximize user engagement.

“Social media platforms use functionally similar algorithms to predict sharing behavior based on information like number of likes or follower counts, which signal a user’s influence and potential ability to amplify content across the network,” Xia said. “This is essentially how we get viral content.”

Mapping the spread of gossip

The human ability to make these calculations hinges on a mental process called cognitive mapping. In a paper published in 2024, FeldmanHall and Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences (Research) Apoorva Bhandari established that humans replay memories of daily social interactions while sleeping to build a mental map of their social network. 

Even though people do not consciously recognize the relationship of every person in their social network to every other person, FeldmanHall said the maps they unconsciously create serve as reliable guides for whom to spread gossip to, whom not spread gossip to and how gossip will travel.

In this graph of a social network created by Brown University Ph.D. student Alice Xia, the red dot represents the target of gossip, the green dot is the person who is sharing gossip, and the black lines represent how that piece of gossip can spread to multiple people at once.

In the new study, FeldmanHall and Bhandari taught participants about a fictional nine-person network. Then they gave participants a target of gossip and asked them to determine how likely they were to share that gossip with others in the network. 

The initial results showed that participants were using social distance and popularity — measured by the number of direct friends a person had — to predict how information would spread.

Next, the researchers tested their theory on approximately 200 first-year Brown University students living in campus residence halls. 

The researchers mapped this social network by asking all of the study participants about their friendships. Then they asked a subset of 100 participants to judge the likelihood that someone in their network would hear news shared by someone else. Even in such an intricate social network comprising tens of thousands of possible connections, the researchers found that people were able to successfully use social distance and popularity to predict where gossip would flow.

Drawing on this data, the researchers teamed up with Matt Nassar, an assistant professor of neuroscience affiliated with the Carney Institute, to create a computational model of how a person’s brain simulates and predicts the movement of gossip through their social network.

“The brain compresses what a person observed — Mary getting coffee with James, then James hanging out with Adam, for example — into a simplified map of the network, which allows the person to make educated guesses about who will hear what, even when those people are several steps removed from each other,” Xia said.

According to FeldmanHall, the new study findings throw cold water on common conceptions of gossip as mere idle chatter.

“The fact that our brains invest this much mental math in keeping our gossip out of the wrong hands is testament to the power of gossip and the sophistication of the human brain,” FeldmanHall said. 

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation (2123469).