Questão 33 - USP FUVEST - Simulado Oficial - 1ª Fase (1ª edição) 2026

    Gossip may not be good for you, per se, but it’s deeply connected to human nature.

    The historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote that gossip helped early Homo sapiens form larger and more stable bands. He borrowed the idea from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that language — and by extension, gossip — replaced grooming, a social bonding practice still seen among our primate cousins.

    Humans needed something that would help them keep upto-date with friends and family as they spread out across distances, and networks of Homo sapiens were becoming too large for everyone to effectively groom everyone else.

    Or, to put it another way, humans evolved to gossip. The language of social bonding is thought to play a pivotal part in ensuring our survival and later flourishing.

    Gossip’s ability to drive “vicarious learning” and facilitate “social connection” was the subject of a recent study by scientists at Dartmouth’s Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.

    Luke Chang, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, explained that he and his co-researcher, Eshin Jolly, dug into the topic because gossip is ubiquitous but not well-studied.

    They created a game where individuals received small amounts of money and were divided into groups of six. Each round, an individual could choose to keep the money or put it into a pot, benefiting everyone. To replicate the societal pressures of gossip, they gave the players the option to exchange private communications, which inevitably turned into a way for people to size up who was hoarding or who was contributing.

    “Our work suggests that there’s a lot more richness there than we’re willing to think about,” Mr. Jolly said. “When I’m talking with you about somebody, even if it’s negative or positive, it’s this idea that we’ve decided to temperature check how we feel about the social world at large.”

The New York Times,¬28 May, 2021. Adaptado.

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