The Science and the Art of Gossip: Why Men are so Poor at it?!

Gossip it turns out is a science… and an art!.. A skill that men have not perfected. They indulge but are poor executors. There needs to be a certain kind of detail and gossip has that unique quality where one gossip rich topic spawns another.. and then that is treated with a certain rigor … .only to have a segway into another! This is the science and art that men are particular poor at. Their gossip is cryptic and short.. which is essentially so UN-gossipy! Here is what a study of Gossip and the role of Mobile phones in accentuating the gossiping ability has come up with:

Perhaps even more critical, for our female participants, was men’s failure to recognise the importance of detail in the telling of gossip.

"I find men can gossip, but they never know the detail."

"It’s like you’re telling a story. My boyfriend phones me with information and I turn it into gossip."

"Yeah, it’s definitely how you tell it, the detail – some people have the ability to make the smallest thing funny."

"Men just don’t do the ‘he said, she said’ thing – and it’s no good unless you know what people actually said."

"My boyfriend gets very impatient when I take twenty minutes to tell him something that happened in thirty seconds. Whereas if he’s telling me something I have to spend twenty minutes asking questions to get the detail!"

"Women tend to speculate more.they’ll talk about why someone did something. give a history to the situation."

The notion of detailed ‘speculation’ as a crucial element of gossip was particularly important to the women in our groups. They felt that their mobile gossip conversations were much longer than those of males, not only because they gave more detail but also because each detail could be the subject of speculation about possible motives and causes, which in turn required a detailed raking over of ‘history’ – what led up to the situation under discussion – and speculation about possible outcomes.

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