Children think that it is good to share personal secrets, but bad to gossip

• In Event: You’ll never guess what I heard: When and how do children gossip?

Abstract

Recent research suggests that children make important inferences about their social world based on information sharing: telling someone a secret signals friendship (Liberman & Shaw, 2018), but gossiping can harm friendship (Liberman, 2020). We build upon these findings in two ways. First, we ask whether the breadth information sharing matters: is sharing information more widely (e.g., with everyone rather than with only one person) a worse friendship cue? Second, we include reputation measures: how do children evaluate information sharers?

To ask these questions, we ran two studies with 4- to 11-year-olds (S1: N=318, S2: N=349). Children heard a vignette in which an asker asked a sharer about some information. The sharer either 1) did not tell the asker (or anyone else), 2) told only the asker, or 3) told everyone. In Study 1, the information was the sharer’s personal secret (the sharer had performed poorly on a spelling test). In Study 2, the information was gossip (a third party had performed poorly on the spelling test). Participants rated the sharer’s reputation (1 = Really Bad to 6 = Really Good), and the friendship between the asker and the sharer (1 = Really not friends to 5 = Best friends). In Study 2, children also rated the friendship between the sharer and the third-party (who was being gossiped about).

Children’s ratings of the sharer’s reputation varied based on both the type of information shared (personal secret vs. gossip) and how widely the information was shared. Specifically, for personal secrets, children rated the sharer most positively when she shared her secret with everyone, and least positively when she kept her secret to herself. For gossip, we found the opposite pattern: a gossiper was rated negatively when he gossiped to everyone, and most positively when he kept the gossip to himself (see Figure 1). In terms of expectations of friendship, children rated the friendship between the asker and sharer the closest when the sharer only revealed the information to the asker, regardless of which information was being shared (see purple bars in left and middle panels of Figure 2). In contrast, children rated the friendship between the sharer and the third-party (who was being gossiped about) the closest when the sharer did not reveal any information to the asker (Figure 2, right panel).

Taken together, children think it is positive for people to share their own secrets, but not to gossip. Children also take breadth of information sharing into account for both reputation judgments and expectations of friendship. Whereas sharing gossip with only one person may indicate friendship between those two people, it also indicates less closeness (compared to keeping gossip private) between the sharer and third-party. Furthermore, these inferences increase with age as children become more attuned to the social complexities of keeping and sharing secrets (graphs show data from older children (7.5+ years), for whom differences in patterns of responses were significant).

Authors

• Zoe Liberman, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Alisa Bedrov