How Children Handle Gossip and What It Teaches Us

How children come to understand the world around them through their interactions with others has long fascinated psychologists. Children can learn important social skills and norms through observational learning which also involves observational listening. However, when children listen to adult conversations (and they do!) they will soon discover that a “huge proportion” is gossip, according to Professor Paul Harris.

“It's chit-chat about who's going out with whom, who's been laid off, whose children are doing well in school, etcetera, etcetera,” explains Harris. Which in turn begs the question: How much do children accept or query what adults tell them, especially when it goes against their instincts? 

A new study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, provides some intriguing insights about gossip and childhood growth and development. 

While previous research has focused on what sways children to trust or doubt gossip, this paper, co-authored by Harris and three researchers in China, goes a step further. It examines whether children spontaneously try to find out if the tittle-tattle they hear from adults is true or not and the factors that might cause them to investigate things a little further. Finding answers to these questions, the researchers argued, would help them better understand how children react to and process gossip, and develop critical thinking skills.

Getting help from PAW Patrol and Super Wings

To get to the bottom of their questions, the researchers recruited 64 children from a kindergarten in Zhejiang, a province in eastern China, and enlisted the help of two popular animated television programs: PAW Patrol and Super Wings. 

The 5-year-old and 6-year-old children were randomly assigned to two different groups and were individually invited to watch the TV shows. Children from one group were told a piece of gossip about one of their favorite characters while the other children were fed a piece of gossip about a character they disliked. 

All the children heard both positive and negative messages about their character — which they were told was related to an event that had occurred in the previous episode of the show they were watching — and were then asked if they believed it. Afterwards, the adult who had delivered the gossip made an excuse to leave the room and a hidden camera was used to observe if the children, who had already been instructed on how to switch between episodes of the videos on a touchscreen, spontaneously attempted to find out if the gossip they heard was true or not.

Key findings: 

• The 6-year-old children were more likely than the 5-year-olds to investigate if the gossip they heard was accurate.
• If the children didn’t trust the gossip they heard, they were more likely to try to find out if it was true.
• Both age groups were more likely to mistrust and attempt to verify gossip that negatively targeted their favorite characters versus positive gossip.
• There was no real difference in the children’s efforts to verify negative or positive gossip about characters they disliked.

Going deeper

Here, Harris reflects on the new gossip study and its broader implications:

Why was it important to find out if the children in your study would try to verify what they heard? 
From a practical point of view, it's important because a lot of gossip is false. But more generally, this was part of a broader question about the extent to which young children are reflexively credulous and don't really bother to investigate and explore and in some ways in the physical domain, that characterization is accurate — they're not very good at checking. These results are slightly encouraging in the sense that perhaps when children have a stake in the information, a personal stake — because they're, for example, very keen on this particular person or this particular character — when they hear something that violates their image of that person or character, they do go out and check it. To some extent, this paper is unusual in showing that young children are a bit more active, rather than just acquiescent or overly receptive. 

How do the findings of this paper relate to previous studies? 
We've done quite a lot of work where we tell children something that actually is not true about some objects in front of them. So, we might give the children some Russian dolls. And we ask them, “Which do you think is the heaviest?” And even 4- or 5-year-olds will say, “Oh that one,” pointing to the biggest one. And then you can say, you know actually it's not that one, it's the smallest one. And then you can have the adult who's just told them this make an excuse and leave the room. So, the child who has been given this disconcerting information, something that doesn't fit their intuition — they tend to think that bigger means heavier — you can film them surreptitiously and see whether they're prepared to investigate. And we have pretty solid evidence now that if it's a 4- or 5-year-old they may pick up one or two of these Russian dolls, but they don't do any kind of systematic investigation. By the time you get to 6- and 7-year-olds, you will often see something more targeted. They might pick up, for example, the biggest one at one end and the smallest one at the other, lift them up simultaneously and kind of heft them as if trying to figure out which is the heavier. 

What is interesting about the gossip paper is we're finding this investigative tendency, this skepticism, surfacing at a younger age. But what we have to keep in mind is two things have changed. On the one hand, [the gossip study involves] a piece of social information about somebody they like — that might be the critical factor, but it's also possible that just going back and taking another look at the video is perhaps an easier check than thinking about how you could lift two things simultaneously and compare them. 

What are the most significant takeaways from your study? 
I suppose the most interesting takeaway is that, thinking about parents and teachers, if they are talking to children who report some gossip, it sounds as if, from these results, that by the time children are 5 or 6 years of age, they're going to be receptive to some kind of pushback from the teacher or from the adults [who might] say, “Well, are you sure that that's true? You might go and talk to the person who told you this and ask them how they got the information.” The implication is that, even at this fairly young age, children, whilst they are credulous, there are certain aspects of their thinking which is more cautious. And in certain practical cases they take steps spontaneously and autonomously to go check it out. But my assumption is that children could be encouraged to do this in appropriate circumstances. And we could imagine young children coming home with information about particular groups or the family that's moved in next door or whatever, being encouraged to think more carefully about whatever gossipy information, somewhat negative information they've received.

Should parents and educators be encouraging this sort of critical thinking in children?  
I think it’s a complicated arena to navigate because on the one hand there are so many domains where children, just like we adults, have to rely on what other people tell them. If we just think about many aspects of science or if we think about history, it's not as if children can listen to a historical claim and say, “Well hold on a second, I'm just going to go and check that out.” Something that happened during the Civil War is not something that a 6-year-old is going to be able to investigate for themselves or something about the evolution of species. It’s not as if the average elementary school child is going to go and have a think about Darwin's theory and see whether it's actually true. On the one hand, a lot of education has to accept that children learn richly and appropriately from other people but the downside of their doing that is that very often they may be susceptible to misleading information. And to be honest of course, we know that adults are not invulnerable in that domain as well. Exactly how to navigate this balance between encouraging children to listen carefully and to absorb and to assimilate versus to step back and think critically and carefully is a difficult one.

Future studies

The researchers suggested, in their paper, that the impact of culture on children’s behavior should be considered in future studies since all the children in their experiments were racially homogenous. They also posed the possibility of using real people instead of cartoon characters. However, Harris notes the challenges that many psychological experiments run into when trying to explore topics that are connected to the real world but that remain innocent and harm free.

“Ideally, we would like to move it into the real world,” Harris says. “But of course, if you think about the mechanics of doing that and the ethics of doing that, it becomes more complicated. Are we going to take young children aside and present them with some negative information about their best friend? Well, that's a bit dubious.”