Facebook Has It: The Irresistible Violence of Social Cognition in the Age of Social Networking

2. Gossip As Social Cognition

The revaluation of gossip, which started in the past century, is indebted towards two main disciplines: anthropology on the one hand, evolutionary studies on the other hand. Anthropologists focused on gossip as a means of social regulation (Gluckman, 1963; Yerkovich, 1977), but the mechanism often maintained a sense of otherness, both geographical and chronological: gossip could be indeed more than mere idle talk, but that was true as far as other people, at a different stage of development, were concerned. Conversely, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology immensely boosted gossip’s reputation (no pun intended) by showing its relevance as far as it concerns the dawn of language and sociality (Dunbar, 2004; Wilson, Wilczynski, Wells, & Weiser, 2002). Partially because of the hard-to-die naturalistic fallacy, which reverberates in the moral justification of whatever is hypothesized to have been part of our evolutionary heritage, these studies managed to obtain a massive dissemination in public opinion: the result was a widespread acceptance of the common utility of gossip as “social hygiene”, which came with a complete obliteration of its violent nature.