Hom’s work is the talk of the town

Do you gossip? Don’t worry. Holly Hom can assure you that you’re absolutely normal. And you’re participating in a social contract as well.

Scouting for a dissertation topic, Hom, a graduate student in psychology, thought about what makes her feel closer to people. She realized that exchanging information plays a large part, and she had her topic: what is the function of gossip?

“It’s like a validation process of the appropriate moral code,” Hom said. “So gossip is really a vehicle of social bonding, or it can be. It’s a social alignment process. By making an evaluation of somebody, you’re defining who is part of the ‘in’ group, who is part of the ‘out’ group. It’s not just talk.”

She uses five criteria to determine whether something is “prototypical gossip”: it has a negative evaluative tone; it’s idle (it doesn’t really have anything to do with you and me); the parties are familiar with the person who’s the target; the information is central to core values; and the target is not present.

Hom wanted to show that real prototypical gossip serves a social function, that people do it for a reason. “Real prototypical gossip can facilitate social bonding and enforce social norms,” she said. “It’s defining appropriate and inappropriate behavior.”

When a topic is moral — “I can’t believe he cheated on her” — and the gossiping parties agree, they validate their mutual moral code and feel closer to each other.

Her research on “people talk” among U.Va. undergraduates showed that 65 percent of their social interactions involved talking about someone who wasn’t there. “People are spending a lot of time talking about other people,” she concluded. Evolutionary theorists might say that’s an efficient way of finding out who can be your ally, whom you can trust. “It’s efficient because you’re finding out about it without having to experience it yourself.”

Unlike many a graduate student, Hom finds that people’s eyes don’t glaze over when she talks about her dissertation. “It’s such a part of everyday experience,” she said. “Everybody gossips, but it’s entirely under-studied. Nobody knows why people are doing it and what they get out of it. It’s gratifying to help contribute to our scientific understanding of it.”