Gossiping Is Fun. It’s Natural. And These People Won’t Do It.

In its most recent survey on the topic, the polling giant YouGov found that half of Americans admit to having “spread a piece of gossip.” YouGov did not report that the other half of Americans are filthy little liars, but it probably could have.

Gossip — often defined as informal talk about people who are not present — is a universal feature of human culture. It’s also long been the target of passionate, widespread censure. “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people,” says Leviticus 19:16. In “The Analects,” Confucius is reported to have said that “the gossip-monger is the outcast of virtue.” The Quran proscribes backbiting. In 2017, a neighborhood in the Philippines passed an ordinance against gossip, making it an offense punishable with a fine and an afternoon of picking up litter. Even in increasingly secular America, more than two-thirds of Americans believe gossiping is usually or always bad for society.

And yet … who doesn’tgossip? “Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need,” wrote Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer and chemist. OK, sure, some of us don’t gossip, exactly, but we do vent. Or we get something off our chest. Some of us gossip only to our spouses, or only to our mothers, only about our mothers. Some of us spill the tea gleefully and at every opportunity. Some of us do it only when gossip is prefaced with a, “Now, you know I don’t like to talk bad about anybody.” But a key part of being human, a social animal, is talking about others in one form or another.

Isn’t it?

Except there are people out there who don’t obey nature, who try their best to deny themselves the satisfaction of that primary need, even in a world where the word “gossip” is associated more with a guilty pleasure than a sin.

I spoke with nearly a dozen of these people, whom I’ll call abstainers. The people I spoke with were almost entirely women. I found them through friends, through articles they’d written about gossip, through a Facebook group for Bay Area women. Different things motivated them. For some it was religion or karma. Many were inspired by Don Miguel Ruiz’s self-help book “The Four Agreements,” which preaches the importance of being “impeccable with your word.” One young woman had been motivated to examine her own speech after becoming the subject of hostile office rumors.

No one I spoke with claimed to be a perfect exemplar of pure speech, but all of them took it seriously. I sought out the abstainers in the hopes of understanding why these people would deny themselves what seemed to be a natural expression of human sociality. Also, I hoped to get a sense of how this choice affected their lives and their relationships. What were they getting out of it? I was curious, in other words, if they could be on to something.