Gossiping (a bit) shouldn’t make you feel bad. Various studies by psychologists and anthropologists have shown the importance of sharing gossip to strengthen emotional and social bonds, and even to unite perfect strangers against bullies. It is a form of communication that helps survival and that, according to recent research, could begin as young as five years old.
An experiment led by Jan M. Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) has found that children of this age already use gossip to fix the reputations of others and identify potential cooperators, cheats and bullies. .
Engelmann and his colleagues proposed a game with two puppets to several dozen 3 and 5-year-olds. A child had to give four tokens to one of the puppets, or receive them from him. One of the puppets always followed the rules, but the other one tricked the child and gave him more or less chips. After removing the dolls, the researchers ushered a second child into the room and recorded the comments made by the boy who had just passed the test.
Only 23% of 3-year-olds who said something to their partner commented on something about the doll’s behavior, information that would have been useful to the second child in deciding which puppet to play with. Things changed with the 5-year-old participants. 44% of these warned that one of the puppets was a fake, even when he gave them more tokens than stipulated.
Little has been studied of gossip as a social tool among children under the age of 10, but this research confirms that children have known about its usefulness earlier than previously thought.
