CAT-ty Gossip and Rumor: An Integrative Framework

Abstract

Despite the power and extensive applications of communication accommodation theory (CAT), it has yet to be linked to the most common of conversational activities, gossip. We examine both the ways in which gossip plays a role as a communicative adjustment and the influence of accommodative behaviors upon gossip. The latter are relevant to strategic uses of gossip to influence others’ reputations, particularly others regarded as sexual rivals. We consider how gossip can operate as a form of norm talk, reinforcing ingroup norms. Gossip is conceptually and colloquially close to rumor and we explore how manipulation of ambiguity between the two may operate as an accommodative move while attacking others. The penultimate section concerns gossip and rumor on the internet and the forms of accommodation that promote conspiracy theories and allow abuse and trolling. Finally, theoretical implications for CAT and future directions for research on gossip and rumor are proposed.

From our perspective, gossip is ubiquitous; it is one of the most common forms of conversational exchange across cultures (Dunbar, 2004; Emler, 2001; Robins & Karan, 2020). It has not, to date, been embraced within the precincts of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), arguably, one of the foremost interdisciplinary theories of interpersonal and intergroup exchanges (Guydish, in press). Gossip is conspicuous in its absence as can be gauged by examining—for parsimony's sake at this juncture—five (out of 11) of key CAT Principles (after Giles et al., 2023; Giles & Gardikiotis, in press).

Communicators have expectations of appropriate and desirable adjustments in different contexts, based on interpersonal, intergroup, cultural, and prevailing sociohistorical dynamics.

During an interaction, the nature of people's adjustments is a result of their motivations for, and abilities in, adjusting to others.

When communicators seek to reduce their subjective, perceptual, and experiential distance from another person, social robot, small group, or audience, they converge in their speech and behaviors where they believe others to be in their communicative practices.

Well-calibrated convergences across many communicative features decrease perceived distance, improve rapport, thereby increasing satisfaction and mutual understanding.

When communicators wish to increase perceived distance from others, they will not accommodate and may even diverge in their speech and communicative behaviors from where they believe others to be.

Gossip is, likewise, not part of the mainstream diet of the larger subdiscipline of language and social psychology or in the arena of intergroup communication; for the latter, see the comprehensive 73-page Index to the two-volume Encyclopaedia of Intergroup Communication (Giles & Harwood, 2018) where it does not appear. Hence, our aim here is to remedy that omission and discuss how CAT can be heuristically and beneficially linked to our understanding of gossip, and also rumor, in interpersonal and intergroup encounters (for an appreciation of the conceptual distinction between these types of encounter, see e.g., Dragojevic & Giles, 2014).

Since CAT's inception some 50 years ago (Giles, 1973; Giles et al., 1973; see also, Giles, 2023a), it was crafted to describe and explain strategic adjustments people make in their verbal and nonverbal speech and communicative patterns—whether purposely or nonconsciously—to calibrate the social distance between themselves and others during an interaction and, consequentially, how these adjustments are attributed, evaluated, and responded to by recipients. As such, these adjustments constitute the accommodation that is at the heart of CAT, which has been investigated across numerous languages, cultures, social groups, and applied and institutional settings (e.g., hospitals, courtrooms, and policing; for recent overviews, see Giles et al., 2023; Giles, in press).

Over time, the theory evolved beyond its original focus on accent and bilingual adjustments in human speech to incorporate a much wider variety of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and communicative practices (e.g., dress style, appearance, writings), communication transmitted via various media formats (e.g., computer-mediated and human–machine communications), and messages transmitted within and between nonhuman species (Giles et al., 2023). In sum, CAT is an established, highly versatile theory, with its own literature employing a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methods, possessing “remarkable staying power” (Meyerhoff, 2023, p. 1), and remains vibrant after 50 years.

Communication accommodation theory has yet, however, to be applied to commonplace, informal conversations between two or more people in which they discuss others not present, a form of exchange sometimes described as gossip. In this article, which is a first step toward filling that gap, we also examine the role of gossip in what has been referred to as “norm talk” (Belavadi, 2018; Hogg & Giles, 2012) that provides a solid intergroup dimension to gossip. Inter alia, we also consider the connections—and differences—between gossip and rumor and touch on the growing significance of electronically mediated communication (mobile phone, text, email, social media) which is the focus of Stage 7 of CAT (Giles & Gardikiotis, in press) wherein accommodation through and with new technology has recently been developed.

Hence, the article is organized as follows. We begin with a definition of gossip before summarizing what is currently known about gossiping. The ways in which gossiping can operate as an accommodative adjustment are then reviewed and brought to the fore. Following this, we switch perspectives and consider when and why accommodation might regulate the exchange of gossip, looking at the strategic use of gossip to damage others’ reputations. This leads to a more explicit examination of gossip as norm talk which, as above, provides a more collective, intergroup dimension to these activities and where social group identities are on the line. We then turn to the link between gossip and rumor, with particular attention to online abuse and the conspiracy theories promoted by Alex Jones and others. Finally, we return full circle in conclusion, to propose how the CAT Principles can be modestly elaborated to include aspects of gossip and rumor as well as the Principles of Intergroup Communication.

Gossip: Nature and Definition

We define gossip as an informal conversational exchange concerning named third parties not present: these third parties are typically known personally to at least one of those involved in the exchange (see also Haviland, 1977). This definition requires some elaboration and justification. Despite the now extensive research literature on gossip, there is no single agreed definition of its subject (Dores Cruz et al., 2021a). One of the most popular defines gossip “…as evaluative talk about a person who is not present” (emphasis added, Eder & Enke, 1991, p. 494; see also, DiFonzo & Bordia, 2007; Foster, 2004; Noon & Delbridge, 1993; Van Iterson & Clegg, 2008). However, as Dores Cruz and colleagues point out, this formulation is problematic. First, purely factual claims about others—“he slept with a porn star just after his wife gave birth,” “she spent the evening preparing meals for the local homeless”—can be the basis for evaluations of the target. Indeed, most of the evidence of a person's character, whether good or bad, consists not of evaluations but of the facts of their conduct. Second, “gossip receivers might attach a different evaluative meaning to statements from what senders intended to convey” (Dores Cruz et al., 2021a, p. 263). Third, a piece of gossip may only acquire evaluative significance at some later point in time. For these and other reasons, these authors argue against this particular definition.

We would add that this definition is unduly restrictive in other ways. It excludes not only factual claims about what others have done and said but also much else about them that are purely factual. Foster (2004) disparages this kind of personal information exchanged in conversations as “mere news,” but we cannot accept that “news” about such matters is somehow too trivial or inconsequential to be included in the category. One final point on evaluation: gossip that does include evaluations of the conduct, character, or competencies of others, either explicitly or in the implications of reported facts is, nonetheless, of considerable significance in social life and of particular interest in the context of CAT, as we shall argue.

We have proposed above that the target of gossip is typically known personally to at least one of those involved in the exchange. This is not to deny that celebrities, strangers, and just people one knows of but has never met can be gossiped about. Our proposal is based on our view of one of the primary functions of gossip, which is keeping people informed about the social world of most consequence to them (Emler, 2019), and that is the world composed of their family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and work colleagues, their immediate personal social networks. Finite attentional resources preclude monitoring a social world much beyond this (see also, Dunbar, 1993).

This brings us to the motives for gossiping. Foster (2004) emphasizes four gossip functions that recur in the literature: information, entertainment, friendship, and influence, but at least the first three of these are more appropriately motives for gossiping. Beersma and van Kleef (2012) describe them as such, although their list is slightly different: enjoyment, information, negative influence, and group protection. But these motives will sometimes also be combined. Thus, as regards friendship or the intention to promote sociability (on this motive, see also, Dunbar, 1993; Fine, 1986; Gambetta, 1994; Merry, 1984), this could be pursued by entertaining others or by offering them information they might value. This goal, essentially minimizing the social distance between those involved in exchanging gossip, relates gossip directly to CAT, as we discuss below.

Yet, the motives and interests of gossip provider and audience are not necessarily the same. Providers normally intend what they say to be understood as true, but audiences may doubt the provider's credibility. Providers may wish primarily to entertain while their audience is more focussed on information the entertainment reveals. Providers may seek to influence opinions of their audience through scandalous revelations while the latter is more interested in entertainment or sociability. And audiences may also recognize these differences in interest.

Finally, although some researchers (Brady et al., 2017; Michelson et al., 2010) have treated gossip and rumor as interchangeable, there are reasons to treat these as distinct, and not just because rumor has a broader scope: it can refer to events as well as to named people. We elaborate on relevant differences later but to anticipate, crucially they differ in the claims made about the veracity of what is communicated.

Briefly summarized, the main features of gossip are as follows. It is commonplace among both males and females; there is little evidence for sex differences in either the amount people gossip or the number of others with whom they gossip, although there is some evidence of gender differences in content and motivation. There do, on the other hand, appear to be wide variations between individuals in each of these respects. Most of the content of what is exchanged is not evaluative (Dunbar et al., 1997); it is far more likely to be descriptive and factual: what others have done and said, who else they know, the perceived state of their relationships, their state of health, financial circumstances, etc. The great majority of these conversational exchanges occur between people who know one another; very few are one-shot interactions between strangers (Emler, 2019), and most involve just two people (Dunbar et al., 1995; Emler, 2019; see also, Peperkoorn et al., 2020).

Gossip and Accommodative Behavior

How might this form of communicative behavior, gossip, intersect with the processes envisaged in CAT? A useful starting point is Gluckman's (1963) analysis of gossip from an anthropological perspective. He argued that gossip is the means through which community members sustain the salience of their moral standards, ensure vigilance for breaches of the standards, and punish transgressors. For people to exchange gossip is in effect to express membership of a perceived shared community and solidarity with its defining values. Thus, the act of gossiping is itself a crude calibration of the presumed social distance between those involved. Later treatments have made this calibration more explicit, identifying gossip as a means through which close social ties are created and sustained (Ellwardt et al., 2012).

Burt's (2001, 2005) “echo hypothesis” offers a more nuanced account in which the content, in terms of CAT, constitutes a clearly accommodative adjustment. Burt's framing of the process has been in terms of politeness and the rules of etiquette; we seek to avoid disagreements when we talk to one another, and particularly when we exchange opinions about mutual acquaintances. In these conversations we select, and in the interests of politeness, we select those things we believe a particular other wishes to hear, namely, views consistent with what the other already believes or thinks about our shared social worlds. To a large degree, this accords well with CAT Principle 3 above where the accommodator has presumptions or stereotypes about where the accommodate typically resides cognitively, knowledge-wise, emotionally, and communicatively. The gossip exchanged, therefore, only echoes back existing opinions (see also, Higgins, 1992; Higgins & Rholes, 1987). However, to be clear, CAT provides an alternative gloss on Burt's hypothesis to the extent that echoing in gossip is driven not so much by the desire to be polite but by a desire to minimize social distance with the audience. Conversely, therefore, speakers can increase social distance by declining to echo the views of their audiences.

In between these divergent choices of content, there are interesting cases in which the speaker's choices may be shaped by the accommodative responses of the audience. To understand how and why, consider first the following. Gossiping, according to McAndrew (2019), is a skill. Indeed, there are several reasons why the task can be complex and benefit from skilled performance. It is helpful for the speaker to know what gossip will be of interest to a particular audience, which means who else the audience might know or be interested in knowing about, and what that audience already knows and does not know about these others. Speakers may also make a calculation as to what they are willing for the audience to know about what they, the speakers, know or think about others. Of course, each of these calculations can be made with more or less precision and accuracy and, in turn, with consequences for the degree of interest, value, or usefulness the audience finds in the gossip provided.

Additional demands on the speaker arise on those occasions gossip does venture into evaluations of others, though evaluations are not necessarily explicitly expressed. Evaluations of others’ character or competence tend to rest on perceptions or beliefs about what those others have said or done, in other words, the supposed facts of their behavior. It does, of course, follow that the provider of these “facts” may fully appreciate the evaluations they will prompt in the audience. The gossiper may be aware of an audience's connections to others—some evidence indicates people can be well-attuned to the sentiments of their acquaintances as implied in CAT above, who they like and dislike, how close or antagonistic their relations are (Kenny et al., 1996)—and make further calculations in the manner Burt proposed. Gossip providers may also make calculations as to what their disclosures about others reveal to their audience about themselves and their own sentiments. But, at the outset, the speaker may not be sure of the audience's prejudices with respect to particular objects of gossip—and audiences themselves can experience conflicting desires. Some of these intricate dynamics are captured in Bergmann's (1993) characterization of gossip as discreet indiscretions: “I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but just between you and me…”. (Bergman's definition of gossip is narrower than that advocated here). Similarly, for Spacks (1985), gossip involves circulation of slanders, betrayals of trust, and penetration of privacy (for privacy issues and theory, see Petronio et al., 2022).

In other words, gossip can venture into sensitive areas and, thus, areas hazardous for the gossip provider. Such hazards include the possibility that the audience sees the gossip provider as motivated by malice, as a source who is indiscreet and careless with others’ confidences and, perhaps, as someone who is, more generally, worryingly untrustworthy. For their part, audiences may gain reassurance for endorsement of their own opinions, or alternatively, may incline toward loyalty to friends and a need to defend them against criticism, but can also see advantage in learning new things about the people around them. Leaper and Holliday (1995) argue that women are better at encouraging informative disclosures and more likely to do it. How does the gossip provider decide how much it is judicious to reveal about what they know or have heard, when such revelations breach confidences, or reflect badly on the audience's acquaintances? Such empirical questions foreground the research agenda we proffer in conclusion.

This, we submit, is where conversation that is face-to-face and one-to-one has advantages. One-to-one means that only single audience and their particular interests, sentiments, and reactions need to be considered. Face-to-face provides immediacy of feedback across multiple channels and allows the speaker to make rapid adjustments to content. The feedback itself potentially includes those communicative adjustments described in CAT. When the audience accommodates, then the speaker may feel safe to continue or even go further. In contrast, what is construed by gossipees as nonaccommodative moves should caution the speaker to retreat, qualify, or change direction. Or, speakers may engage in accommodative strategies of their own, distancing themselves from revelations harmful to others by attributing those revelations to unnamed sources: “the word on the street is…,” “people are saying that…” (cf. Giardini, 2012). Audiences, for their part, have their own interests including the desire to elicit from providers disclosures that the latter might otherwise be inclined to withhold (relatedly, see Eder & Enke, 1991, below); indeed, their own accommodative actions and dilemmas may be shaped in pursuit of these interests (for the notion of accommodative dilemmas, see e.g., Dragojevic, 2019; Maguire et al., 2023).

At this point, we should say something about the value of gossip. There is a view, not without its advocates in the research community, that gossip deals in trivia or fabrications so riddled with error as to have little or no informational value (see, e.g., Peters & Fonseca, 2020). This view reflects, in part, an image of gossip that equates it to Chinese whispers; information communicated from one person to another through a long chain is inevitably distorted, simplified, and exaggerated with each successive step along the chain (Baron et al., 1997; Gilovich, 1987; Thompson et al., 2000). This also goes with the image of gossip as a confidential disclosure—“Don’t tell anyone I said this, but…” with the teller entirely confident the disclosure will be passed on. However, this is not our view. It seems, to us, improbable that people should routinely devote so much time and attention to exchanges of a worthless resource.

Gossip may, indeed, contain noise; individual exchanges may even have a high noise-to-signal ratio. But it does not follow that those involved are unable to extract value from the aggregate of their exchanges and plausibly do so in the same ways that psychometricians extract valid conclusions from messy data (Emler, 2019). Moreover, there is good, albeit indirect, evidence from recent person perception research that people can do this with a high degree of reliably in arriving at judgments of others’ personality (Connelly et al., 2022; Connelly & Ones, 2010; Oh et al., 2011). As regards the long communication chain problem, Mesoudi et al. (2006) have shown that gossip about third-party relationships was successfully transmitted along extended chains with little information loss. More significant is Wilson et al.'s (2000) finding that people expect to give less weight to information about another that is mediated by more than one link. There is also a problem of information overload; pay comprehensive attention to a social world much more than one step beyond one's circle of acquaintances and one risks being swamped with information. There are good reasons to expect gossip chains to be short (Boissevain, 1974; Granovetter, 1973) and the social world of interest to be confined to very few degrees of separation (Watts, 2004). There is a further protection audiences have against being misled—and a disincentive to providing misleading gossip: the audience is seldom dependent on a single provider. Correspondingly, audiences give more credence to claims repeated by multiple sources (Hess & Hagen, 2006).

Allowing, therefore, that what is exchanged when people gossip can have considerable value, it tells us what others are like and what sociopolitical resources they possess. Moreover, CAT has the potential to illuminate ways in which the benefits of the exchange, whether to one party or both, can be maximized. Note here that the primary reason people give for engaging in gossip is to be better informed (Beersma & van Kleef, 2012; Hartung et al., 2019), consistent with evidence that most gossip conveys information, not evaluation (Dunbar et al., 1997; Levin & Arluke, 1987).

Gossip as an Adversarial Strategy

Much gossip carries positive news about others, about their achievements and successes, their acts of kindness, heroism, or compassion. Indeed, the positive reputations that people enjoy rest upon such gossip. There is, however, a variety of gossip that is not primarily informative but quite closely fits the title of this article. It promotes evaluation yet not in any sense of contributing disinterested evidence of another's character. It is intended to damage someone's reputation, and as a description of this variety of gossip, “catty” fits rather well (see our article title): it can be cruel, nasty, acerbic, unkind—while the fit also accords with evidence, or at least claims, that the most common purveyors of this variety are young women (Campbell, 2004; Massar et al., 2012). As such, it is surely no accident that “bitching” (Stollznow, 2024) is a synonym for a certain kind of gossip. But why, we ask from a social egalitarian perspective, should this category of persons—young women—be more disposed than others to engage in this kind of gossip (for a review of gender issues in language use from an intergroup perspective, see Menegatti & Rubini, 2018; Palomares, 2012; Wingate & Palomares, 2018)? One evolutionary argument is that it is pursued as part of an intrasexual competition strategy (Davis et al., 2019; see also, Reid et al., 2010). Consequently, the targets of this gossip are members of the same sex—women are “catty” about each other—and, in the case of young women, the targets are, allegedly, other young women seen as sexual rivals (Buss & Dedden, 1990; De Backer et al., 2007; Vaillancourt, 2013; Watson, 2012). In this context. Reynolds et al. (2018) have provided evidence consistent with the idea that young women can use gossip strategically to damage the reputation of other women when these others appear to be sexual competitors.

If “catty” gossip is such a strategy, one might then suppose that the ultimate (if not immediate) audiences are necessarily the men for whom these women are competing. If so, derogating rivals comes with costs (Fisher et al., 2010): women who do it are viewed more negatively by male audiences; they are likely to be seen as less friendly, kind, or trustworthy, and crucially less desirable as mates. This last interpretation would seem to sabotage the claimed strategic objective. There is, however, another view as to how the strategy works, and it is consistent with evidence that this variety of conversation is most likely to occur between women. It is that the strategic objective is to ostracize rivals and isolate them from network support (e.g., Geary, 1998). And as this objective would lead us to expect, women are more sensitive than men to being talked about. Galen and Underwood (1997) talk about women being “devastated” when they know they are discussed by others; they worry about exclusion from a valued ingroup. It is significant that they should assume others are not talking kindly about them behind their backs.

Even so, attacking rivals through conversations with other women carries dangers. Women who denigrate other women through reference to their personality, appearance, or sexual morals are more likely to be seen by a female audience in quite negative terms (Fisher et al., 2010; see also, Kakarika et al., 2024). Given that such exchanges happen and are perceived by women to do so with some regularity (Tracy, 1991), dangers of this kind are somehow overcome. One possibility is that audience interest in learning “dirt” about others is sufficiently strong that the audience conceals its antipathy toward the dirt provider, at least while the dirt is being provided and processed. In CAT terms, the audience gives off accommodative signals. Eder and Enke (1991) provide examples of teenage girls exchanging critical observations of other girls in which the most common audience response to a criticism is to agree or encourage further negative comments. Another possibility is that care is taken in the selection of audiences, with close friends preferred as the safest, least risky choice. In line with this, Grosser et al. (2010) report that negative gossip, as above, tends to be reserved for the ears of close friends. And Leaper and Holliday (1995) found that females were particularly likely to give highly encouraging responses to gossip heard from friends, while the amount of negative gossip shared was highest among female friends.

Reynolds et al. (2025) offer a further way in which gossip providers may mitigate the risks of voicing damaging information about perceived sexual rivals: the information is framed in terms of concern for the welfare of the rival. Across a series of studies, they found that when framed in this way the disclosed information can harm the reputation of the rival but with reduced cost to the source of this disclosure. The gossip strategy they describe, sources presenting themselves as caring, compassionate individuals, also points to the potential close reciprocal relation between ways of gossiping and accommodative action.

To introduce a little balance, males also talk in ways that are calculated to advance their own strategic interests in competition for mates. The disappointment is that, compared to the research on women's talk, so little attention has been paid to male conversational activity directed to the same ends. One study indicates that males may compete not by gossiping disparagingly about others, but by talking about themselves and doing so in self-promoting ways. Dunbar et al. (1997) found that men were more likely than women to talk about their achievements; they equated this to the sexual displays or lekking (Fiske et al., 1998) of males in other vertebrate species. Reynolds et al. (2025) found that neither sex was disposed to see their gossip as intended to damage others’ reputations, but males were slightly more likely to acknowledge this possibility. The possible ways in which males use gossip in status competition with other males, potentially by denigrating perceived rivals does merit further attention. Such need for further attention also applies for gay relations. However, it is also possible gossip serves a more positive purpose in this context, providing information about potential partners. One study (Russell et al., 2013) found that straight women and gay men were likely to treat each other as trustworthy sources of mating advice.

Finally, potential sexual relations pose hazards for people whatever their sexual orientation. Exchanging intelligence about others, including critical or negative observations, can be benevolent in this respect, serving what Beersma and van Kleef (2012) identified as group protective needs. Such would be cases, highlighted by the #MeToo movement (Tuerkheimer, 2019), of women exchanging experiences of men's sexual misconduct or suspicions of men inclined to sexual harassment (He & Huang, 2024), in effect, warning one another of dangers in their social worlds.

Gossip as Norm Talk

At this point, we can see that gossip may operate as a form of “norm talk” (Hogg & Giles, 2012, p. 375) or the means by which normative expectations are communicated (Belavadi, 2018). Such norm talk would invoke the rules and standards that define and distinguish a society, a community, or a social ingroup. Group social norms may be internalized, as has been the standard position of psychology's models of socialization, but they are also constantly reiterated, recalled, and reemphasized in the daily conversational life of communities. For example, “I thought civility was what we at our college value, but I overheard John and Jill being rude to people and interrupting all the time,” “I think we Christians all agree that the family Christmas is what we all enjoy and plan for, but I hear that Fred is going with, you know, his really odd buddies, to another part of the country during the festive season.” The social life of any human group does not rely on internalization alone to sustain its rule-governed shape. Relatedly, Hogg and Giles (2012, p. 312) wrote:

A fundamental role of language and communication in intergroup relations revolves around the social psychology of group norms and prototypes that define and prescribe people's social identity. Through communication people learn about, construct, display, and strive to change group norms and social identities…

Hogg and Giles go on to note that normative leaders are viewed as more influential in norm talk and find themselves in this role because they appeal to the ingroup's beliefs about its prototypicality.

Critically, gossip can play a key role in intergroup life and this was part of the point of Gluckman's (1963) analysis of gossip. It is not talk that states rules but talk that implicitly draws attention to what the rules are. It does so by discussing instances of their transgression and the transgressors involved, and by expressing disapproval of those transgressions and transgressors. Baumeister et al. (2004) make a similar point when they discuss gossip as an instrument of cultural learning. Their argument is that gossiping, by exchanging instances of behavior that might come with praise or condemnation, approval or disapproval, operates as a teaching device introducing community and ingroup members to collective standards and solutions. Gossip involves the use of narratives to convey information about all kinds of rules, including moral and pragmatic rules, and can be regarded as an illustration of identity accommodation (see, e.g., Bernhold & Giles, 2020). Beersma and van Kleef (2012) report evidence on the use of gossip to identify violation of group norms, describing one of the motives for gossip identified in their study as group protection. Norm talk can also take a more indirect or implicit form in gossip exchanges: alter-casting the target(s) by identifying them with an outgroup. McAndrew et al. (2007) report that individuals selectively reveal positive information about ingroup members, but negative information about others identified with an outgroup (though they seem to mean enemies or rivals). Carrim et al. (2024) found that Black African gay women reported experiencing marginalization through the gossip of straight coworkers. In other words, they were gossiped about as outgroup exemplars, the gossipers discussing their otherness as opportunities to define themselves distinctively as an ingroup. Sucharita Belavadi (personal communication) also wrote (in ways we have edited) that “…gossip as norm talk could definitely have a clarifying feature in that we can understand how fellow group members think, try and reduce subjective uncertainty about the norm, and why people who deviate from the norm, do so.”

Gossip and Rumor

That languages tend to have different words for gossip and rumor—among European languages, Russian appears to be an exception (see Google Translate)—implies the words refer to recognizably different kinds of thing. However, dictionary definitions (and authors) frequently bracket them together, suggesting no absolute distinction is recognized. Consider two dimensions along which claims about the world, and more particularly our social worlds, can vary. One is the degree of certainty about the truth value or veracity of a claim. Reference to a claim as a rumor pushes it toward the uncertainty end of this dimension (for uncertainty management process in interpersonal and intergroup communication, see Afifi & Afifi, 2009 and Afifi & Tikkanen, 2022; with respect to intergroup communication, see Hogg, 2001; Van Knippenberg, 2023). The other is clarity about the source of the claim. At the high clarity end are claims we make based on our own direct experience. Attributing the claim to a named third party attenuates that clarity a little. It is further attenuated when we fail to identify a source, as when we use one or other of the formulae noted above to distance ourselves from personal responsibility for a claim (cf. Giardini, 2012). Referring to a claim as a rumor makes the lack of clarity explicit. People may, additionally, play around with these variations for strategic reasons as in blurring the boundary between rumor and gossip. This might be done by prefacing a claim about another with “He is believed to have…,” “She supposedly…,” “People are saying that he…,” “She allegedly…” (Baum et al., 2020). It is also important to remember that people differ and circumstances vary—and that both can be associated with variations in motive for gossiping.

Among the differences between people that are relevant in this context are variations around agreeableness, sadism, and psychopathy (March et al., 2024). Some individuals are strongly disposed to be considerate of others, kind, and averse to causing others distress and, by contrast, there are others with no such scruples (Hartung et al., 2019). And within this set are, colloquially, so-called mischief makers, people who take a perverse delight in causing mayhem in their social worlds, spreading discord, fake news, plausible conspiracies, and downright lies. There is no reason to suppose such a tendency is correlated, either negatively or positively, with social skills; consequently, the more unskilled mischief makers will be identified, dismissed, and ostracized. As to the more socially skilled, one of the tools available to advance their agendas is the signals of “communicative accommodation” and their competence in correctly reading those signals (Pitts & Harwood, 2015; Zhang & Pitts, 2019). Another is the fuzzy boundary between gossip and rumor and the opportunity this provides to mess with ambiguity as to where this boundary lays by exploiting the qualifiers noted above. Thus, damaging revelations about others can be passed off as unsubstantiated rumor, yet offered with enough qualification as to cast a seed of doubt in the minds of the audience: maybe there is some truth in this, no smoke without fire, etcetera. One reason why this can work as mischief makers intend is that, as Baum and colleagues (2020) found, qualifiers that cast doubt on the trustworthiness of a factual claim about another make almost no difference to the evaluations the audience makes about that other.

There are, however, uses of gossip and rumor along with uncertainty around the difference that can help people adapt to crises and cope with hazards. So, for example, during the COVID epidemic, both gossip and rumor circulated about the behavioral choices of acquaintances that might carry infection risks. High-risk acquaintances could then be avoided (Dores Cruz et al., 2021b).

Mischief Making and Disinformation in the Electronic Age

Current generations have access to channels beyond face-to-face conversation, notably texting, messaging, and social media (Harari et al., 2019), channels also used to spread gossip and rumor as instruments of indirect aggression (Garcia-Fernández et al., 2022). But their dynamics differ from conversation, notably in the absence of immediate feedback and, thus, the kinds of accommodative response that might moderate attacks on others. Inhibition is further reduced to the degree that messages can be posted anonymously. Consider the sheer volume of nastiness to be found on the internet. Rather a lot of people, and certainly not a negligible minority, seem ready to exploit the anonymity social media platforms afford them to broadcast abuse about named others. Vidgen et al. (2019), for example, report survey evidence indicating 10–20% of the UK population have been targeted by online abuse.

The sources of attacks on others are not always anonymous, however. Certain conspiracy theorists offer examples, albeit extreme, of exploiting the fuzzy boundary between gossip and rumor to attack named individuals, but also identifying themselves as the authors of the attacks. The 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, in which 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six staff members were murdered, attracted a number of conspiracy theorists, most notably Alex Jones (The Guardian, 2024). A common theme of the theories he and others promoted was that there had been no actual shooting or murder. The conspiracies alleged that the government of the day had faked the whole episode to generate public support for stricter controls on gun ownership, an argument that works well with conservatives’ reactions to mass shootings (Stroebe et al., 2022). Conspiracy theorists’ various claims verge on gossip by identifying named individuals, in the process questioning their motives, their character, even their identities. So, for example, the individuals supposedly grieving for the loss of their children were in reality actors. Particular individuals were named and singled out for attack, including Leonard Pozner and Robbie Parker, both parents of victims, and Gene Rosen who had sheltered others from the gunman. The promoters of the conspiracies did not claim personal knowledge of these individuals but played on the idea of strong rumor to the extent that it amounted to overwhelming hearsay evidence.

There are numerous analyses of the attraction of conspiracy theories, essentially trying to explain their appeal to a wider public (Douglas et al., 2019). Our focus is different: it is on the sources and what they get from their audience that encourages them to continue promoting their theories. Our point is that these and other conspiracies that attack and vilify named individuals can only flourish to the extent that there is an audience making accommodative adjustments that the sources can detect. Given there is no direct, face-to-face contact between source and audience, and that a source is unlikely even to be aware of the identities of those in the audience, how can this occur?

Clearly, these “theories” do not find universal acceptance, and among those who are skeptics or downright rejectors, there may be various reactions. Many will simply ignore the claims; consequently, they remain invisible to the sources and, hence, can themselves be ignored. The voices of those who are more visible in their rejection—their nonaccommodative responses—may be discounted as, for example, the reactions of an outgroup, such as the gun control zealots and lobbyists. The receptive audience matters not because they find the conspiracy claims credible but, because in various ways, they express their concurrence; they make accommodative adjustments toward the source and those accommodations encourage the source to persist. Such adjustments can include supportive posts, hits on a website, ticks and likes on sources’ social media platforms or, in the case of Sandy Hook conspiracies, several million views of a YouTube segment and, for Felzer and Palacek, purchases of their book, “Nobody died at Sandy Hook.”

Theoretical Implications

In this final section, and having suggested above crossroads at the interaction of gossip, rumor, and intergroup communication accommodation, we seek to tease out theoretical implications, amending and elaborating both CAT and (broader) Intergroup Communication Principles (Giles, 2012, 2023b), and as ways of returning full circle to our starting point. We follow this with a future research agenda based on these specially and on our analysis.

We begin by amending the selected CAT Principles introduced earlier to acknowledge the value of conceptually including the phenomena of gossip and rumor in this framework, and these appear in bold. Toward this end, we do not, at this stage of theorizing, wish to disentangle rumor from gossip, even though we have argued that they are distinct social constructs:

Communicators have expectations of appropriate and desirable adjustments in talk and other message forms, such as gossip and rumors in different contexts, based on interpersonal, intergroup, cultural, and prevailing sociohistorical dynamics.

During an interaction, the nature of people's adjustments, such as, for example, the introduction of gossip and rumors, are a result of their motivations for, and abilities in, adjusting to others.

When communicators seek to reduce their subjective, perceptual, and experiential distance from another person, social robot, small group, or audience, they converge in their speech and behavior where they believe others to be, including assessments of their social knowledge from which gossip and rumors can springboard off.

Well-calibrated convergences, including favorably intended and received gossip and rumors, decrease perceived distance, improve rapport, thereby increasing satisfaction and mutual understanding.

When communicators wish to increase perceived distance from each other, they will not accommodate and may even diverge in their speech and behavior from where they believe others to be, which may include negatively received gossip and rumors.

Given our highlighting certain intergroup parameters of gossip and rumor in the above, we felt it appropriate to move to established Principles of Intergroup Communication (Giles, 2012; see also, Giles, 2023b, Principle VI) and to refresh those three introduced by Hogg and Giles (2012, p. 382) that focused on norm talk with the inclusion of gossip and rumors); again, the new elements are bolded:.

• The expression and discussion of ingroup (and outgroup) norms are major ingredients of the communicative diet of intergroup life, including outgroup gossip and rumors. In these ways, normativity is controlled and negotiated in everyday life, while ingroup deviancy can be located and oftentimes publicly constrained, distrusted, and marginalized.

• Group leaders perform vital lead roles in forming, promulgating, and judiciously redefining group norms oftentimes strategically via outgroup gossip and rumors at regular as well as important junctures in a group's development.

• Leaders are chosen who espouse in cogent ways prototypical attributes of the group and they retain their social impact to the extent that they can fashion group trust in them as well as foster elements of a distinctive culture and feelings of community via outgroup gossip and rumor.

This article has attempted to open-up new arenas for the study in gossip and rumor in interpersonal and intergroup settings and this unveils an almost infinite number of research questions for an empirical, multimethod programmatic agenda that we hope might inspire researchers to pursue. Here, we end with a parsimonious flavor of the kinds of directions—and there obviously are a plethora of other possibilities—to engage:

• Under what circumstances do recipients of gossip and rumor label it one or the other? And what language (beyond the label) is used to describe and express how they felt by invoking such by these different labels?

• Can we detect occurrences of “objective” gossip and rumor that are not labeled as such real-life discourse, and does this make a difference to reactions to them?

• Can we differentiate between ingredients of ingroup gossip (or rumor) and its outgroup counterparts? What kinds of intergroup settings determine the nature of these? Do leaders mine gossip and rumor more than followers, how, when, and why?

• In what ways, if any, are interpersonal and intergroup gossip and rumors differently enacted and responded to?

• When, how, and why are gossip and rumor introduced into a conversation and how they are discursively managed by recipients?

Clearly, there will be methodological challenges in designing such investigations, but we trust and envisage that the social psychology of language, CAT, sociolinguistics, and intergroup communication will rise to the challenge.

Conclusions

Treatments of gossip as a means to foster social bonds are reinterpreted as accommodative responses aimed at reducing social distance between those involved. Though most gossip is informative and evaluatively neutral, gossip can sometimes and intentionally prompt evaluation of its targets. But such gossip carries risks for its source and accommodative responses by both source and audience allow the risk to be managed. Explicit use of gossip to damage the standing of its target, as has been claimed for some conversations between females, magnifies this risk and, consequently, the need to manage it. Both in this context and, more generally, where gossip invokes evaluations of people and their personal and intergroup conduct, it can also operate as a form of norm talk, drawing attention to the customs and standards that define the ingroup. Another variant in the use of gossip is to attack others in a way that exploits the fuzzy boundary between gossip and rumor. In this, internet trolling, abuse, and conspiracy theories rely both on this ambiguity and forms of audience feedback that operate as accommodative responses.