OBJECTIVE: Gossip-evaluative talk about an absent third party-exists in surgical residency programs. Attending surgeons may engage in gossip to provide residents with feedback on performance, which may contribute to bias. Nevertheless, the perspectives of attending surgeons on gossip has not been studied.
METHODS: In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews about gossip in surgical training were conducted with attending surgeons. We performed a reflexive thematic analysis of transcripts with a grounded theory approach to describe attendings\' perceptions of their role in gossip within surgical residency.
METHODS: Interviews were conducted from September 23, 2023, to November 27, 2023 via Zoom™.
METHODS: Eighteen surgery attendings associated with 7 surgical training programs were interviewed.
RESULTS: Six themes were developed: 1) Attendings typically view gossip with a negative lens; thus, well-intended conversations about resident performance that meet the academic definition of gossip are not perceived as gossip; 2) Gossip can damage attendings\' reputations as surgeons and educators; 3) Mitigating the negative impacts of gossip by maintaining accurate and objective standards of honest communication is hard; 4) Attendings express concerns about hearing other attendings\' impressions of residents prior to formulating their own opinion; 5) The surgical hierarchy restricts the volume and content of gossip that reaches attendings, which may limit their knowledge of program culture; and 6) It is very difficult to mitigate gossip at the program level. Ultimately, attendings utilize gossip (e.g. triangulating their experience) with the goal of providing residents feedback.
CONCLUSIONS: Defining important conversations about resident performance as gossip should not discourage these critically important conversations but rather underscore the importance of combating harmful gossip through 3 behaviors: 1) committing to objective communication; 2) limiting or reframing information about resident performance that is shared with attendings who have yet to formulate their own opinions; and 3) regulating gossip in particular high-stakes microenvironments (e.g. the operating room).

Gossip allows children to effectively identify cooperative or trustworthy partners. However, the risk of being deceived must be faced because gossip may be false. One clue for determining gossip\'s veracity is the number of its sources since multiple informants spreading identical reputational information about others might imply that another\'s moral traits are viewed unanimously among members of a social group. We investigated whether 7-year-olds (N = 108) would trust gossip from multiple independent sources. In our study, they received multiple pieces of positive/negative reputational information about one agent and neutral information about another agent by gossip from either single or multiple informants. Then they allocated rewards to and chose rewards from the gossip targets. The 7-year-olds acted upon positive gossip from multiple informants and did not rely on positive gossip from a single informant. By contrast, they relied on negative gossip regardless of the number of informants. In either valence, however, they were more likely to allocate rewards based on gossip from multiple informants than a single informant. This result indicates they are sensitive to an objective index, specifically the number of sources, for judging the veracity of gossip.

This article examines how employees use gossip as a resource to cope with social isolation. Building on a qualitative study with 32 truck drivers in a Western European company, our research identified gossip in close relationships and gossip in distant relationships as distinct patterns playing a different role in coping with social isolation, and a third pattern in which gossip was not beneficial. First, gossiping with close friends at work helped drivers engage in emotion-focused coping by reducing stress and loneliness. Second, gossiping with distant colleagues helped drivers engage in problem-focused coping by exchanging knowledge involving people in the organization. Third, gossip avoidance occurred in distant relationships, where drivers limited gossip exchanges going beyond instrumentally useful information. Overall, these findings show that drivers relied on different layers of their social network to cope with social isolation. Enriching previous research, this study shows that gossip represents an essential resource for emotion-focused and problem-focused coping.

Negative gossip is a double-edged sword, which can harm group members but also protect them from harmful others. Current theory proposes that gossip receivers assess gossipers\' selfish and prosocial intentions based on different social cues, to determine whether the negative gossip behavior is morally justifiable. However, assessing gossipers\' moral intentions does not fully clarify when and how justifiability of negative gossip is assessed by receivers. Using goal framing theory, I propose a parsimonious way of understanding when gossip receivers will be interested in determining whether sharing the negative gossip was justifiable, and how they assess justifiability. In line with predictions, results of two scenario experiments showed that in a hedonic and gain goal frame gossip justifiability was similar to a baseline level, suggesting that receivers had no particular concerns regarding gossip justifiability. However, in a normative frame receivers assessed negative gossip to be less justifiable when social cues indicated that the gossiper was motivated to harm others for self-interest compared to when such cues were absent (Study 1). In Study 2, gossip was more justified when social cues indicated that that the target broke the salient social norm and signaled that the gossiper has low motivation to harm. Moreover, in a normative frame, participants were more interested in further establishing gossip truthfulness compared to participants in a gain, hedonic, or control condition in Study 1, and in a hedonic condition in Study 2. These results show that individuals\' goal frame determine their interest in gossip justifiability and how they assess it. This may help solve the paradox of negative gossip by drawing from goal framing theory to understand individuals can be avid gossip consumers, while holding widely disapproving attitudes towards this behavior.

Healthcare management faces significant challenges related to upward communication. Sharing information in healthcare is crucial to the improvement of person-centered, safe, and effective patient care. An adverse event (AE) is an unintended or unexpected incident that causes harm to a patient and may lead to temporary or permanent disability. Learning from adverse events in healthcare is crucial to the improvement of patient safety and quality of care. Informal communication channels represent an untapped resource with regard to gathering data about the development of AEs. In this viewpoint paper, we start by identifying how informal communication played a key factor in some high-profile adverse events. Then, we present three Critical Challenge points that examine the role of informal communication in adverse events by (1) understanding how the prevailing trends in healthcare will make informal communication more important, (2) explaining how informal communication is part of the group-level sensemaking process, and (3) highlighting the potential role of informal communication in \"breaking the silence\" around critical and adverse events. Gossip, as one of the most important sources of informal communication, was examined in depth. Delineating the role of informal communication and adverse events within the healthcare context is pivotal to understanding and improving team and upward communication in healthcare organizations. For clinical leaders, the challenge is to cultivate a climate of communication safety, whereby informal communication channels can be used to collect soft intelligence that are paths to improving the quality of care and patient safety.

Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals\' reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others\' reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation. The evolution of gossip further facilitates these two functions of gossip and sustains the evolutionary cycle.

Supportive psychotherapy is one of the most widely used psychotherapies. The need for therapists for mental health treatment, especially anxiety and depression, is increasing all over the world. However, therapists are insufficient in terms of quantity and quality in societies with low socioeconomic and sociocultural levels. At this point, I am reporting an extraordinary social observation that a group of people in a city with a low sociocultural level unknowingly establish a secret \"therapist-client\" relationship with each other to find solutions to their mental health problems.

We conducted three studies to examine how the recipients of negative workplace gossip judge the gossip sender\'s morality and how they respond behaviorally. Study 1 provided experimental evidence that gossip recipients perceive senders as low in morality, with female recipients rating the sender\'s morality more negatively than male recipients. In a follow-up experiment (Study 2), we further found that perceived low morality translates into behavioral responses in the form of career-related sanctions by the recipient on the gossip sender. A critical incident study (Study 3) enhanced the external validity and extended the moderated mediation model by showing that gossip recipients also penalize senders with social exclusion. We discuss the implications for practice and research on negative workplace gossip, gender differences in attributions of morality, and gossip recipients\' behavioral responses.
UNASSIGNED: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-023-05355-7.

What happens when children have formed an impression of a peer based on prior gossip, but later learn from direct observation that the gossip is untrue? We interviewed seventy 5- and 6-year-old children in Zhejiang, China. They first heard conflicting positive and negative gossip about an absent third party, and subsequently learned which piece of gossip was true. Initially, both 5- and 6-year-old children tended to endorse the positive rather than the negative gossip. However, when they learned about the inaccuracy of the positive gossip based on their own direct observation, 6-year-old children subsequently doubted it, whereas 5-year-old children showed no such shift. Taken together, the results show that when children decide what gossip to believe, they are initially swayed by its valence but with age they increasingly weigh gossip in relation to their own direct observation.

Much information people receive about others reaches them via gossip. But is this gossip trustworthy? We examined this in a scenario study (Nsenders = 350, Nobservations = 700) and an interactive laboratory experiment (Nsenders = 126; Nobservations = 3024). In both studies, participants played a sequential prisoner\'s dilemma where a gossip sender observed a target\'s (first decider\'s) decision and could gossip about this to a receiver (second decider). We manipulated the interdependence structure such that gossipers\' outcomes were equal to targets\' outcomes, equal to receivers\' outcomes, or independent. Compared to no interdependence, gossip was more often false when gossipers were interdependent with targets but not when interdependent with receivers. As such, false positive gossip (self-serving when interdependent with targets) increased but false negative gossip (self-serving when interdependent with receivers) did not. In conclusion, the interdependence structure affected gossip\'s trustworthiness: When gossipers\' outcomes were interdependent with targets, gossip was less trustworthy.