In this episode, I discuss the evolutionary roots of gossip, and why it is a waste of time and energy. I also discuss the case of Donald Trump and his tweet about a woman who accused him of being a serial killer.
00:02:16.780And so when people are spending a lot of their time that should be very much ideologically aligned, slamming each other.
00:02:26.400Now, I don't mean to imply that there are no valid reasons for people to, once in a while, criticize each other's positions, of course, as long as it's substantive, right?
00:02:35.220But as I explained, I think maybe it was yesterday or the day before, many of you have heard of the seven deadly sins.
00:02:43.400And of the seven deadly sins, the one that many times people are surprised to hear that that's the supra sin, it's pride.
00:02:51.440And it's pride in a very particular way.
00:02:54.620In French, and I've explained this before, but it's worth repeating here for those of you who've maybe never heard me mention this.
00:03:00.120In French, there's the recognition of positive pride and negative pride.
00:03:06.680Positive pride might be, you know, I'm very proud of my work.
00:03:10.920And negative pride, in the sense that it is used in the deadly sins, is being, you know, full of self-love.
00:03:18.660In a theological sense, you're so full of self-love that, you know, you can't, there's no room to love God or to be pious and so on.
00:03:27.580And so the idea is that all of the six other deadly sins stem from excessive self-love, pride, which is then manifested through lust and greed and envy and so on.
00:03:40.180Well, many of the people in the conservative movement that are attacking each other, and I say this with all due respect to some of them, is really driven by a sense of misplaced pride.
00:03:56.120You know, these people said this about me and it's not fair and therefore I'm now going to stand against this group and so on.
00:04:02.860And that's a very, very myopic way to view things because the enemy that we share doesn't care that you create these fractures amongst the various camps, right?
00:04:21.640Now, this doesn't, I don't mean to imply that there aren't cases where discussing something about people is not worthwhile.
00:04:31.000So, for example, I recently put up a clip which has received a lot of views regarding the manner by which Donald Trump, you know, posted a tweet subsequent to Rob Reiner's murder.
00:04:44.940Now, there I wasn't engaging in, you know, frivolous gossip.
00:04:48.860Hey, guys, did you hear what Donald Trump did?
00:04:51.780Rather, by the way, that's not how my brain works.
00:04:54.660Rather, there was a general phenomenon that was worthy of discussion of which that particular exemplar would serve as a demonstration of that phenomenon.
00:05:07.700So, think of it as a, you know, a case study in a moral philosophy course.
00:05:14.700Should you hold your tongue when someone has passed away or are they fair game even when they've passed away because they've lived their life so dishonorably?
00:05:25.500So, many people listened to my clip regarding Donald Trump and Rob Reiner and said, well, sorry, Professor, I disagree with you here.
00:05:46.900And I was simply raising the fact of whether this could have been an opportunity while Donald Trump could have been, you know, dancing on the inside with joy that Rob Reiner has faced such a calamitous end to his life by his son allegedly killing him.
00:06:02.020He could have appeared, as Machiavell explained, you know, it's not whether you're honest or not as a political leader, it's what the populace thinks you are, right?
00:06:15.380So, he could have appeared very presidential and magnanimous by simply saying, hey, a great artist, great director, and a wonderful actor from all in the family passed away.
00:06:48.900And when you have, you know, Islam coming down at you, maybe you want to be spending less time worrying about what this one said about you and what that one said, and maybe, you know, fall into ranks so that we can combat the common enemy that we all have, whatever it might be.
00:07:07.300Okay, now, I just want to, before I get into some of the evolutionary stuff, I wanted to mention a few other points.
00:07:17.740So, number one, let me just go to, if any of you are religiously inclined, I went to Grok and I asked it to give me some key biblical injunctions against gossip.
00:07:29.260And they're broken up into Old Testament prohibitions and New Testament warnings.
00:07:36.740So, from the, I might not read all of them, let me read a few.
00:07:39.420Leviticus 9.16, do not go about spreading slander among your people.
00:07:43.880Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor's life.
00:08:11.300Proverbs 20.19, a gossip betrays a confidence, so avoid anyone who talks too much.
00:08:18.200And then one more from the Old Testament, and then I'll give a few from the New Testament.
00:08:21.740Proverbs 26.20, without wood a fire goes out, without gossip a quarrel dies down.
00:08:28.320And then from New Testament, Romans 1.29.30, they have become filled with every kind of wickedness.
00:08:35.580They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters.
00:08:39.420Corinthians 12.20, I fear that they may be discord, jealousy, slander, gossip, arrogance, and disorder.
00:08:47.500There are some dot, dot, dot, meaning those are not verbatim quotes, but the parts that are relevant.
00:08:53.080Ephesians 4.29, do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up.
00:09:02.580Timothy 5.13, they get into the habit of being idle, right, idle tongues, but also gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to.
00:09:12.640And then the final one, brothers and sisters, do not slander one another.
00:09:17.640Now, I'm hardly as pure as, you know, a deontological statement that says, under no conditions should you slander anybody.
00:09:26.640There are cases where, you know, I come after hard someone, but there's a reason.
00:09:31.820They insulted me, so I want to retort back or so on.
00:09:34.420But just idle gossip, frankly, is rather useless.
00:09:39.780And again, when you're facing a common enemy that is extraordinarily more important than your petty little, you know, slights, then maybe rise above it.
00:09:50.400Which brings me to a quote that has been attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.
00:09:54.840But, you know, there are different debates as to who originally came up with the, you know, the exact quote.
00:10:02.940But the general one that's attributed to her, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
00:10:26.280I mean, I'm not saying that I want to talk the epistemological positions of Karl Popper at every party that I go to, right?
00:10:34.600I can also talk about soccer and beautiful women.
00:10:37.340But I don't like to just sit around with a bunch of people that are just gossiping about others.
00:10:43.780And I hate to say it, one of the reasons why I, you know, very quickly became disillusioned going to academic conferences, most of the academics were morons.
00:10:53.500They'd sit around the table and talk about, you know, these little slight things.
00:10:57.560Oh, did you see he's coming from this university?
00:11:00.400He's, it was just mean girls, but, but with people that had many titles before and after their names, whereas I'm coming there and let's talk big ideas.
00:11:10.240So remember this quote, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
00:11:17.840Now, why are some of these people in the conservative movement engaging in, in idle gossip?
00:11:23.740Well, I've already said that some of it comes from the supra vice of, you know, pride.
00:11:32.000Oh, I was mentioning earlier that there are two French words that recognize that.
00:11:35.560For those of you who speak French, in French, you recognize the positive and negative connotation of pride.
00:11:58.020Orgueil is the, it's, it's a, it's a prideful sense of self that, for example, if I'm hurt, it's my orgueil that's been hurt, my sense of pride in the negative sense of the term.
00:12:10.080So interestingly, in English, you don't quite have a positive and negative distinction of pride, whereas in French, you do, okay?
00:12:19.980Now, what's the other reason why many of the conservative, people in the conservative movement are doing this?
00:12:26.280Some of them are principled, and they're doing it for, you know, reasonable reasons.
00:12:31.260But others have decided, in my view, that I get a lot more clicks, hence clickbait, if I just spend all my time gossiping like mean girls, which is terribly disappointing, because many of the people in question, and as you'll notice, I'm not naming names and so on, precisely because I don't want to.
00:12:57.220I want to discuss the bigger issue, which is, under which conditions is it appropriate to be gossiping versus not?
00:13:05.780And I'm proposing that if you're using the modality, the vehicle of gossiping as a strategic choice for clickbait, which I can assure you some of those folks are doing exactly that, then that's probably not a good use of your time.
00:13:24.440And not a good use of the time of the listeners.
00:13:28.240And so there are some people within that conservative movement that I used to listen to quite a bit.
00:13:34.560I've stopped listening to it because I no longer found it interesting.
00:13:38.140If I'm going to sit on the treadmill for 45 minutes, I want to be elevated.
00:13:43.480I want to be hearing about ideas that are being discussed.
00:13:46.240Let's discuss Donald Trump's, you know, isolationist policy, let's say, or whatever it is.
00:13:55.020So we could talk politics, we could talk about Donald Trump, but not just mean girl stuff.
00:14:00.760Yesterday, actually, we watched a movie, my family and I, called Nightcrawler.
00:14:08.340I don't know if any of you have seen it.
00:14:09.960I don't know how to pronounce this guy's last name, Jack or Jake Gyllendall or Gyllendall.
00:14:16.940Well, I don't know how to pronounce it.
00:14:21.640Spoiler alert, if you don't want to hear what happens in the movie.
00:14:26.660He's basically a guy who becomes a nightcrawler.
00:14:29.320A nightcrawler are those guys that get those police scanners and firemen scanners and they listen to it all night, hoping to then get to the whatever accident or whatever the tragedy is so that they can get the footage first.
00:14:51.480And by getting the footage first, they could then sell it exclusively to some, you know, hey, I saw the guy shooting him or immediately after he was shot and his brains were bleeding.
00:15:04.700And here for $5,000, I'll sell you the exclusive.
00:15:08.240And what you're seeing there, the reason why I'm drawing the analogy is in the same way that many of the people in the conservative movement have now decided that gossip is their central, you know, content for clickbait.
00:15:22.060And in nightcrawler, you see what happens when someone is not really a journalist because they're trying to provide information because it is newsworthy, but rather they even get involved in shaping the story.
00:16:10.920Many of you kept complaining that, you know, I didn't read, I didn't self-narrate the parasitic mind, and I didn't self-narrate my happiness book.
00:16:22.180But I can assure you that as it stands right now, I am narrating suicidal empathy.
00:16:29.220So this is your chance to get some self-narration.
00:16:32.720By the way, in my original book, in my 2007 book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, on pages 174 to 176, I do talk about the evolutionary roots of gossip.
00:16:44.760But that's a much more academic and technical book.
00:16:47.580So what I thought I would do instead is read from my 2011 book, The Consuming Instinct, What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving Reveal About Human Nature.
00:16:57.560And I'm going to read from pages 164 to one, let me see, to page 168.
00:17:13.620It really speaks to why it is that humans gossip.
00:17:17.540Now, by the way, let me, before I start reading this, let me remind you of something that some of you might have heard me mention.
00:17:26.900And so forgive me if it's repetitive for you, but let me mention it for those of you who don't know this stuff.
00:17:32.800In evolutionary theory, you distinguish between two levels of scientific explanations, what's called proximate explanations and ultimate explanations.
00:17:43.880And this is a profoundly important epistemological point.
00:17:49.620Proximate explanations explain the how and the what.
00:17:53.680Much of science operates at the proximate level.
00:17:56.900What evolutionary theory does, though, is it adds an extra layer of explanatory power by explaining the ultimate explanation of the phenomenon.
00:18:47.980So on page 164 of The Consuming Instinct.
00:18:50.200And by the way, I really would love for you guys to go out and get the book, not because I'm going to make $3 off you for buying it,
00:18:57.840but because it really was my first attempt, at least in terms of books, of trying to reach a mass audience.
00:19:06.480Because I had written several academic books.
00:19:09.020I'd written many, many scientific papers and so on.
00:19:11.920But I was itching to now have a broader voice.
00:19:15.460I wanted to get people to be excited about evolutionary psychology, you know, as applied to human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular.
00:19:23.760And so The Consuming Instinct, my 2011 book, was that attempt to try to, you know, popularize the field that I had pioneered in evolutionary consumption.
00:19:39.120The title of the section is Hungry for Gossip, TMZ versus General Hospital.
00:19:44.820Social species have evolved elaborate communication systems in part to share ecologically relevant information with their group members.
00:19:53.120The information can be relayed by several sensorial systems, including pheromones, example, social ants, vocalization, example, wolf howling, nonverbal cues, example, gelada baboons flipping their lips to show off their large canines, and bubbling, example, vibrations that male crocodiles emit as part of their courtship ritual.
00:20:15.800My wife and I often joke that when we take out our two dogs out for a walk, their incessant sniffing is akin to our reading the gossip section of a newspaper.
00:20:26.520In their case, they are reading, quote reading, the latest canine gossip news from the neighborhood via the urine markings.
00:20:34.360This is one of the reasons that walking one's dog is important beyond the exercise benefits reaped by both humans and their canine partners.
00:20:42.640The human ability to communicate via language is what differentiates us from all other species.
00:20:49.240This allows us to share social information congruent with the complexity of our social world.
00:20:55.900Of the endless functions that our language faculties serve, gossip is a universally important one.
00:21:02.240Robin Dunbar's book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, provides a thorough analysis of the adaptive value of this form of social exchange.
00:21:14.080Not only do the great majority of conversations revolve around gossip, but also the contents of gossip deal with issues of evolutionary import.
00:21:23.160We do not gossip about our neighbor's quest for self-actualization by his having purchased season tickets to the opera.
00:21:32.980Rather, we are more than happy to gossip that his wife is cheating on him, that he has an impotence problem, that he has just lost his job, or how his wife's breast augmentation surgery went.
00:21:44.700In the end, humans are particularly interested in gossiping about sexual matters, example, promiscuity or closeted homosexuality, as poignantly captured in the 1986 hip-hop song Rumors by the Times Social Club.
00:22:01.200I spent quite a bit of time writing my first book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, as well as this current one, at one of several cafes.
00:22:10.120As might be expected in such public settings, I have been privy to endless conversations from surrounding tables.
00:22:17.080Ambient noises travel even when one is trying to avoid eavesdropping.
00:22:22.060I can assure you that I have seldom heard people engaging in deep intellectual conversations.
00:22:26.660Most chats are either about mundane life decisions, example, we need to purchase a new dining, dining, diner table, or juicy gossip.
00:22:38.020Evolutionary psychologists have actually studied what people gossip about and whom they gossip about.
00:22:44.220Of ten possible sets of people, example, relatives, friends, acquaintances, individuals preferred most to gossip about friends for eight of the ten listed gossip topics.
00:22:58.420These were substance related problems, drug abuse and drunken behavior, gambling problems, sexual misconduct, promiscuity and sexual infidelity, sexual dysfunction, and ethical and criminal lapses, academic cheating and computer theft, for example.
00:23:17.280Receipt of a sizable inheritance and contracting leukemia were the two topics that people preferred to gossip about with relatives, about with relatives.
00:23:27.060This is not surprising since swills are distributed according to genetic relatedness and life-threatening diseases are typically most anxiety-provoking when they strike our family members.
00:23:37.920Of note, individuals preferred to gossip about same-sex individuals and about issues that are particularly important to each of the two sexes.
00:23:48.060For example, men and women preferred to gossip about same-sex individuals who had gambling problems and were promiscuous respectively.
00:23:57.060The bottom line is that we enjoy sharing social information about the vices and problems faced by same-sex others.
00:24:05.840Incidentally, teenage girls are particularly amenable to using false gossip as a bullying tactic against intrasexual rivals as a means of damaging their reputation.
00:24:17.940As the brilliant British philosopher Bertrand Russell quipped, no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices.
00:24:31.720Numerous commercial offerings catered to consumers' insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip.
00:24:38.640These include television shows such as TMZ, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and Extra, as well as long-lasting tabloid magazines such as Star, National Enquirer, and People.
00:24:51.500Think of the most memorable celebrity gossip you've heard over the past five years.
00:25:18.160Life-threatening diseases, Patrick Swayze.
00:25:20.400And moral lapses, Mel Gibson's threats to his young girlfriend and drunken anti-Semitic diatribe.
00:25:28.300Why do we care to exchange gossip about celebrities, all of whom are otherwise total strangers to us?
00:25:33.600If we prefer to gossip about friends as discussed earlier, why do we care about celebrities?
00:25:39.660Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics, has proposed a compelling explanation for this conundrum.
00:25:47.200He argues that in the same way that pornography usurps men's evolved physiological reaction at the sight of seeing a naked woman,
00:25:55.340example, getting an erection, even though it carries no reproductive benefit,
00:25:59.960celebrities cause our affective system, which was originally meant to be activated in our interactions with real friends, to misfire.
00:26:08.280And so you remember this idea of misfiring is something that I use in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:26:13.960Empathy is great when it is properly modulated.
00:26:17.620When it misfires, it becomes maladaptive.
00:26:20.460In other words, I'm continuing to read now.
00:26:23.100In other words, adaptations meant to solve problems in our evolutionary environments can be artificially triggered in contemporary settings.
00:26:31.020After all, many of these celebrities are invited into our homes on a weekly, if not daily basis.
00:26:36.980We develop a sense of intimacy with the celebrities, if not the characters they play.
00:26:42.800And in doing so, our brains are tricked into viewing them as part of our Dunbar circle.
00:26:50.340Kanazawa demonstrated empirically a positive correlation between the extent to which people viewed particular television shows
00:26:57.600and their satisfaction with their real-life friends.
00:27:00.960For example, a woman watches several shows dealing with friendship, example, on a sitcom,
00:27:06.900is more likely than others to transfer that illusory reality into her real-life friendships.
00:27:14.420Moving beyond celebrity news, one can also explore the content of sensational news, example, headlines,
00:27:22.160as a means of gauging the stories that capture our attention and tug at our emotions.
00:27:28.500How do news outlets decide which stories are newsworthy?
00:27:33.140I propose that stories that cater to one of the key Darwinian pursuits, survival, mating, kin, and reciprocity,