How to be a better gossip

Why did humans develop language?

The obvious answer is: ‘to exchange information’.

Yet this may not be why language was so important to our ancestors. The real reason might tell us something we often forget when communicating today.

We had communication before we had language. Our closest surviving cousins, chimpanzees, communicate today in the form of gesture, eye contact, posture and expression.

Researchers from a team that observed more than 8,000 chimpanzee gestures explained to the BBC how they use them to avoid conflict and to coordinate:

“So one chimpanzee could gesture to another that they want food, and the other might give them food or, if they feel less generous, respond by gesturing for them to go away. They might come to an agreement about how or where to groom. It’s fascinating and done in a few short gesture exchanges.”^⁠

It is this grooming activity that may provide a clue as to why language was born.

Chimpanzees use grooming to build and maintain social bonds and reciprocate favours. But grooming is inherently limited as a way of building social cohesion: you can only groom one individual at a time. As the size of a group expands the time required to groom everyone becomes untenable.

So the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that the primary driver of language development might have been to create larger and more powerful alliances and social groups than was possible through grooming alone.

In this theory, language development was driven less by a need to convey practical information (the deer is behind the rock) than by the benefits of gossip (Simon stole the berries). Gossip allowed humans to discuss who was reliable and who was unreliable, who was trustworthy or untrustworthy, who was up and who was down, who was in and who was out.

Gaining a reputation for having betrayed the community or for not reciprocating positive behaviour could result in you being cast out from the group. This might literally have been fatal. Those who were gossiped against would have been less likely to pass on their genes, while individuals with a positive reputation would have been more likely to cooperate, survive and reproduce.

Why does this predilection for gossip matter to communications leaders today?

It matters because most organisations still communicate as if people are waiting to receive practical information. They are not. They are using information to form social judgements, including by assessing who else believes it and whether it is safe to repeat.

We know that the functions of gossip are still strongly present in our make up today.

You have probably seen the famous conformity experiment from Solomon Asch in which people give an obviously incorrect answer if everyone else in the room has given it first. We look to others to decide what is right or wrong, acceptable or desirable before deciding where we stand. The desire to fit in can be so powerful that it will override how we respond in a social setting, even when we are sure others are wrong. A desire not to stand out or look stupid, can over-ride rationality or common sense.

We evolved to trust collective wisdom and value social bonds. We may have been safer being part of a group that was wrong than being right but alone.

The modern workplace, marketplace and public square are not so different. People are still asking the same social questions. Who can I trust? Who is behaving well? Who is gaining status? What does my association with this person, brand or institution say about me?

Research into how information spreads on social media shows that people do not pass on information only because it is true or useful. They pass on what is novel, emotionally charged or morally loaded. False information can travel faster than true information. Moral and emotional language can spread more quickly within groups online.

The modern information environment has also become more private and difficult to overhear. Public social media platforms matter, but smaller groups where people interpret what they have heard, such as WhatsApp groups, may be even more influential.

These peer-to-peer networks are the epitome of modern gossip. Fast, social, and often invisible to the organisation being discussed. It spreads because people tend to trust those closest to them more.

Social media and private messaging apps have done to our communications what language did to grooming: made the transmission of gossip faster, easier and expanded the size of the group it can reach.

Thinking about communication as a social act changes our thinking about what good communication looks like today.

Communications leaders need to think less like publishers and start thinking like social architects: people who shape the informal judgement that forms around an organisation by influencing what gets repeated, who speaks, and which behaviours are visible.

The first lesson is to stop thinking of communication as the act of sending out information. Most communication plans focus on a formal dissemination moment - the big speech or announcement.

But the real communication often comes afterwards. What do employees say on WhatsApp? What do customers say on social media? What do journalists, analysts or investors say to each other privately?

People are interpreting your communications socially whether you intend them to or not. They will be seeking to understand what behaviour the organisation rewards or condemns, who and what it values, and how they fit into the story. People ask what others are saying about your brand, and whether being associated with you will make them look smart and popular or naive and ridiculous.

Good communications therefore involves planning for this second conversation. That means thinking about how you can guide the shared stories the communications will create. For example, by understanding how an audience is likely to receive a message (by pre-testing with select groups), by creating a more emotional story that can be more easily passed on (not a list of messages you want to tell people), or by addressing the questions people will really ask (not by planting questions you would prefer they asked).

Before publishing anything, ask these questions. How will people talk about this when we are not in the room? What will they say to their colleagues or friends? What is the short version they will pass on?

One of the most useful and simple techniques is to say aloud the version you expect employees, customers or journalists to repeat to someone else. If that version is embarrassingly corporate, impossible to communicate quickly, or invites more questions than answers then the communication is not ready.

I wrote a piece on source credibility recently, so I won’t repeat it. Communicators often spend too long on the words and too little time deciding who should say them. If communication is social, the messenger is part of the meaning. People are more likely to believe a message if it is delivered by someone they trust. The most senior person is not always the most trusted person.

People look around to see what others are doing. So communicators should make the right behaviour easier to see.

If you want people to adopt AI tools, show respected teams already using it. If you want customers to try a new service, show people they admire using it.

People are more likely to act when they can see that people like them are already acting. Showing that “people are doing this” is more powerful than saying “we want you to do this”.

That is why case studies, recommendations, testimonials, public commitments, and adoption figures all work. They create a social norm. People are wired to follow other people, not just to analyse evidence rationally.

The origin of language is still debated, but Robin Dunbar’s theory makes a lot of sense to me when set against how people use communication today.

Communication is not simply the transmission of information from one person to another. It is an intensely social experience. Corporate communication fails when it treats people as recipients of messages when they are really participants in a social interaction.

The job of communications leaders is therefore larger than broadcasting or explaining. It is to shape the real story that forms around an organisation after the formal communication. That means thinking harder about what will actually be repeated, who will really be believed, and what behaviours people will follow.

The clue is in the name: we live in the age of social media. And modern communication works best when it recognises the true social origins of language.

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