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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Humans are inherently interested in sharing evaluative information about absent individuals. Indeed, gossip is an everyday behavior that influences how we think and feel about others. Given its ubiquity in social reasoning, and its relevance for socio-cognitive development, research is needed to understand how gossip develops throughout childhood. This symposium brings together an international and cross-disciplinary group of researchers presenting cutting-edge work on when and how children gossip using a variety of methodological approaches (from parent surveys to experimental methods). The first paper provides parent reports of children’s gossip, showing that most 5- to 7-year-old American children gossip about their friends’ norm following and violating behaviors to their parents. They also report experimental evidence for children’s evaluations of when it is okay to share information, showing that 5- to 7-year-old American children believe it is rarely acceptable to share a story about an event that one has merely observed. The second paper reports that American children think it is okay for people to share their personal secrets, but it is not okay for people to gossip. The final paper analyzed how 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds speaking different languages (German, English, and Turkish) gossip and found that children speaking Turkish, a language with obligatory evidential marking, tend to share gossip or absent characters’ actions at an earlier age than children speaking English or German in which evidential marking is optional. Collectively, these three papers bring together studies from multiple perspectives and countries to provide nuanced insights into the development of gossip.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Meltem Yucel, Duke University

• Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy

Individual Presentations

• Gossip’s double-edged sword - Presenting Author: Meltem Yucel, Duke University; Shaylene E. Nancekivell, University of Manitoba; Elissa Harris, Duke University; Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy

• Children think that it is good to share personal secrets, but bad to gossip - Presenting Author: Zoe Liberman, University of California - Santa Barbara; Alisa Bedrov

• Transmission of Gossip: Evidence from German-, English-, and Turkish-speaking children - Presenting Author: Bahar Koymen, University of Manchester; F. Ece Ozkan, University of Toronto; Kirstie Hartwell, University of Manchester; Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley