What purpose does gossip serve among women?
According to a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, gossip can serve as a weapon that women use against each other in strategic competition over men. The broad finding in the paper was that women are more likely to gossip–as in share reputation-damaging information or withhold positive information–about women whom they perceive to be a threat, directly or indirectly, to their own romantic success.
That might explain in part why middle schools are often incredibly cruel social environment for young girls, as a couple of personal excerpts from the paper suggest:
“When I was in junior high, there was this new girl that a bunch of guys liked. Two girls in the grade went around with a petition they made all the boys sign that said ‘I will never go out with the Megawhore.’” – Hope
“Brianna and Mackenzie gave [Jenny] a code name and started calling her Harriet the Hairy Whore. They told everyone Jenny was hooking up with the boys in the woods behind the soccer field…Brianna and Mackenzie started a club called Hate Harriet the Whore Incorporated. They got every girl to join except two who didn't care.”
The researchers conducted five studies to examine the factors that influence whether a woman chooses to harm another woman’s reputation.
The first four studies asked female participants to complete an online survey. In the first study, participants were presented with a photo of an attractive woman and were asked to imagine that she had just joined their social group.
Half of the participants were asked to take the hypothetical situation a step further by imagining that the attractive woman had been flirting with their boyfriends.
Participants were then given positive and negative personal information about the attractive woman, like “she sleeps around a lot” or “she donates to charity.” Then, the participants were asked to rate how likely they were to share each piece of information.
The results showed women were more likely to share negative information and withhold positive information in the hypothetical scenarios where the attractive woman had been flirting with their boyfriend.
The results of the other surveys showed similar findings: participants were more likely to gossip about a woman when she was attractive or wore revealing clothing. In other words, the women, particularly those who measured as being highly competitive, gossiped when they perceived another woman to be a romantic threat. Interestingly, whether a participant happened to like explicitly like a woman seemed not to affect the probability that she would gossip about her.
Unlike the first four studies, the fifth used face-to-face interactions instead of online surveys. The researchers wanted to test whether the level of sexual openness–demonstrated by wearing either sexy or conservative clothing–affected participants’ willingness to gossip about an attractive woman they interacted with in person.
They recruited 104 women for a laboratory study described as one about “how people work together in groups.” Each participant was joined by two other female “participants.” However, both of these women were actually “confederates” of the study.
One confederate was named Francesca. Each participant was instructed to work with Francesca on a puzzle while the third woman worked in another room. While working on the puzzle, Francesca would confess to each participant that she was hungover and had had sex with two men the previous night.
After a few minutes, the instructor would tell Francesca she was free to leave, and then tell the other confederate to enter the room and begin working with the participant on the puzzle. The confederate would eventually ask, “so how was working with the other girl?”
Consistent with the findings from the other studies, the researchers found that participants were more likely to share reputation-damaging information about Francesca when she wore a revealing outfit rather than a conservative one. In other words, women gossiped about Francesca when they perceived her to be an indirect romantic threat, considering that men to tend to be attracted to sexual openness as displayed through provocative clothing.
However, some women framed their gossip about Francesca in altruistic terms, saying things like “I’m worried about her.” It’s not clear whether these instances represented true concerns or attempts to make themselves appear not quite as gossipy.
The researchers suggested that in order to mitigate the suffering of girls like Hope and Jenny, we first need to understand the motivations behind gossiping.
“The theory and data presented here suggest that Hope and Jenny's bullies likely viewed their targets as threatening romantic rivals,” the paper concludes. “The pattern of these behaviors was not random, but straightforwardly followed a romantic competition framework. To the extent that reputation manipulation reflects a viable means for women to compete for romantic and social partners, then strategic reputation denigration should be pervasive. Shining a spotlight on this form of aggression is the first step towards reducing it.”
An artist's depiction of Lola.
Five thousand and seven hundred years ago, "Lola" — a blue-eyed woman with dark skin and hair — was chewing on a piece of pitch derived from heating birch bark. Then, this women spit her chewing gum out into the mud on an island in Denmark that we call Syltholm today, where it was unearthed by archaeologists thousands of years later. A genetic analysis of the chewing gum has provided us with a wealth of information on this nearly six-thousand-year-old Violet Beauregarde.
This represents the first time that the human genome has been extracted from material such as this. "It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone," said lead researcher Hannes Schroeder in a statement.
"What is more," he added, "we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains."
In the pitch, researchers identified the DNA of the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects about 90 percent of adults. They also found DNA belonging to hazelnuts and mallards, which were likely the most recent meal that Lola had eaten before spitting out her chewing gum.
Insights into ancient peoples
The birch pitch was found on the island of Lolland (the inspiration for Lola's name) at a site called Syltholm. "Syltholm is completely unique," said Theis Jensen, who worked on the study for his PhD. "Almost everything is sealed in mud, which means that the preservation of organic remains is absolutely phenomenal.
"It is the biggest Stone Age site in Denmark and the archaeological finds suggest that the people who occupied the site were heavily exploiting wild resources well into the Neolithic, which is the period when farming and domesticated animals were first introduced into southern Scandinavia."
Since Lola's genome doesn't show any of the markers associated with the agricultural populations that had begun to appear in this region around her time, she provides evidence for a growing idea that hunter-gatherers persisted alongside agricultural communities in northern Europe longer than previously thought.
Her genome supports additional theories on northern European peoples. For example, her dark skin bolsters the idea that northern populations only recently acquired their light-skinned adaptation to the low sunlight in the winter months. She was also lactose intolerant, which researchers believe was the norm for most humans prior to the agricultural revolution. Most mammals lose their tolerance for lactose once they've weaned off of their mother's milk, but once humans began keeping cows, goats, and other dairy animals, their tolerance for lactose persisted into adulthood. As a descendent of hunter-gatherers, Lola wouldn't have needed this adaptation.
A hardworking piece of gum
A photo of the birch pitch used as chewing gum.
Theis Jensen
These findings are encouraging for researchers focusing on ancient peoples from this part of the world. Before this study, ancient genomes were really only ever recovered from human remains, but now, scientists have another tool in their kit. Birch pitch is commonly found in archaeological sites, often with tooth imprints.
Ancient peoples used and chewed on birch pitch for a variety of reasons. It was commonly heated up to make it pliable, enabling it to be molded as an adhesive or hafting agent before it settled. Chewing the pitch may have kept it pliable as it cooled down. It also contains a natural antiseptic, and so chewing birch pitch may have been a folk medicine for dental issues. And, considering that we chew gum today for no other reason than to pass the time, it may be that ancient peoples chewed pitch for fun.
Whatever their reasons, chewed and discarded pieces of birch pitch offer us the mind-boggling option of learning what someone several thousands of years ago ate for lunch, or what the color of their hair was, their health, where their ancestors came from, and more. It's an unlikely treasure trove of information to be found in a mere piece of gum.
Dumpster-diving trash parrots
In a study about these smart birds just published in Science, researchers define animal culture as "population-specific behaviors acquired via social learning from knowledgeable individuals."
Co-lead author of the study Barbara Klump of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany says, "[C]ompared to humans, there are few known examples of animals learning from each other. Demonstrating that food scavenging behavior is not due to genetics is a challenge."
An opportunity presented itself in a video that co-author Richard Major of the Australian Museum shared with Klump and the other co-authors. In the video, a sulphur-crested cockatoo used its beak to pull up the handle of a closed garbage bin — using its foot as a wedge — and then walked back the lid sufficiently to flip it open, exposing the bin's edible contents.
Major has been studying Cacatua galerita for 20 years and says, "Like many Australian birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos are loud and aggressive." The study describes them as a "large-brained, long-lived, and highly social parrot." Says Major, "They are also incredibly smart, persistent, and have adapted brilliantly to living with humans."
(Research regarding some of the ways in which wild animals adapt to the presence of humans has already produced some fascinating results and is ongoing.)Clever cockie opens bin - 01 youtu.be
The researchers became curious about how widespread this behavior might be and saw a research opportunity. After all, says John Martin, a researcher at Taronga Conservation Society, "Australian garbage bins have a uniform design across the country, and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common across the entire east coast."
Martin continues, "In 2018, we launched an online survey in various areas across Sydney and Australia with questions such as, 'What area are you from, have you seen this behavior before, and if so, when?'"
Word gets around
Credit: magspace/Adobe Stock
Although the cockatoos' maneuver was reported in only three suburbs before 2018, by the end of 2019, people in 44 areas reported observing the behavior. Clearly, more and more cockatoos were learning how to successfully dumpster dive.
As further proof, says Klump, "We observed that the birds do not open the garbage bins in the same way, but rather used different opening techniques in different suburbs, suggesting that the behavior is learned by observing others." One individual bird in north Sydney invented its own method, and the scientists saw it grow in popularity throughout the local population.
To track individual birds, the researchers marked 500 cockatoos with small red dots. Subsequent observations revealed that not all cockatoos are bin-openers. Only about 10 percent of them are, and they are mostly males. The other cockatoos apparently restrict their education to a different lesson: hang around with a bin-opener, and you will get supper.
Thanks to the surveys, the researchers consider the entire project to be a valuable citizen-science experiment. "By studying this behavior with the help of local residents, we are uncovering the unique and complex cultures of their neighborhood birds."
