One of the most entertaining aspects of our selfish, relationship-controlling instincts is our taste for gossip. Humans are unique because our language allows us to share information rapidly and we love to chatter.
Take the following
quiz: What do you know about Julia Roberts's love life? Who is she dating and
whom has she married? Now answer this: Will you ever meet Julia Roberts? An
amazing number of people who will never, ever even see her, know that she was
married to Lyle Lovett, then got divorced, and is now dating an attractive
actor named Benjamin.
Gossip filled with juicy tidbits is a human universal, and the amount of time spent nattering away does not go down even if there are just a few people about whom to gossip. Many!Kung San groups contain fewer than a dozen people and you might think they'd get bored talking about one another. They don't, and instead spend hours each day dissecting and transferring such information.
Gossip has a function. We share useful information with our allies about food sources, bargain prices, sickness among our rivals, and sexual opportunities. We also use words to grease coalitions against our enemies, spreading harmful and malicious stories. All of this is very helpful in gaining a leg up in the struggle to survive, prosper, and mate.
But our love of social information has run amok. We devour gossip not only about Julia Roberts and other people we will never meet, but also about fake people. TV soap operas are fictional stories filled with precisely the sort of behavior that dominates the discussions around !Kung fires. Did you know that Kimmy is having sex with John and that she is having his baby? We love this information so much that some magazines' sole purpose is to summarize the social data on this fake
world. Why?
Social information about strangers and fictional characters is junk food for our gossipy instincts. For the !Kung and our ancestors, gossip was functional. For us, these tasty nuggets of personal information are "empty calories" —time spent dwelling on people who have nothing to do with us.
