Abstract
Gossip is condemned but also ubiquitous and thought to be essential for groups. This triggers the question of which motives explain gossip behavior. Hitherto, negative influence, social enjoyment, group protection, and information gathering and validation are established as motives to gossip. However, venting emotions—discussed as a potentially important motive—has been overlooked empirically. Furthermore, a lack of consensus about a definition of gossip may have affected previous conclusions about gossip motives. This study (N = 460) expands the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire (MGQ; Beersma and Van Kleef, 2012) by including a subscale measuring emotion venting, the desire to share emotionally evocative experiences. To validate the five motives to gossip across definitions, we asked participants to report the most recent gossip event they experienced, randomly assigning them to one of three instructions containing different gossip definitions commonly used in the literature: (1) broad instructions (sharing information about third parties who have no knowledge of the exchanged information), (2) narrower instructions (adding that the shared information must be evaluative), and (3) instructions using the word gossip. After participants recalled and described a gossip event, they completed the 25-item measure of five motives to gossip: social enjoyment, information gathering and validation, negative influence, group protection, and emotion venting. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the five-factor structure. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis supported full invariance across the three definition conditions. This indicates the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire successfully measures the five dimensions argued to motivate gossip and can be applied in research conceptualizing gossip both narrowly and broadly.
Highlights
Gossip is omnipresent across societies, despite being condemned in public opinion (Wilson et al, 2000; Foster, 2004)
Motives to Gossip We extended the original Motives to Gossip Questionnaire (MGQ) by including a five-item subscale measuring emotion venting, adding two items to the Comparison to the five-factor model χ2 df Robust CFI Robust TLI Robust RMSEA SRMR
−0.162 −0.135 −0.141 group protection subscale, and removing four items from the information gathering and validation subscale2, resulting in a 25-item self-report questionnaire measuring five motives to gossip on seven-point Likert scales [1, 7]
Summary
Gossip is omnipresent across societies, despite being condemned in public opinion (Wilson et al, 2000; Foster, 2004). The Motives to Gossip questionnaire (MGQ) was developed by Beersma and Van Kleef (2012) to measure four theoretically derived motives: (1) social enjoyment, (2) information gathering and validation, (3) group protection, and (4) social influence (cf Foster, 2004). Whereas growing evidence suggests the desire to protect group members against norm violators is a prominent driver of gossip (Beersma and Van Kleef, 2011; Feinberg et al, 2012), this motive was measured with only three items in the MGQ, the minimum number of items to form a scale, making the scale vulnerable to response errors. For reasons of parsimony, we removed four redundant items from the information gathering and validation scale1, 1Results did not differ using all items Such that in the resulting questionnaire, each motive to gossip is measured with five items. We examined the measurement invariance of the MGQ across the three gossip definitions
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