Mind Moves: Guess what? You won't believe this. But it comes from a most reliable source. Gossip is good for you.
So say a significant number of researchers in sociology, anthropology and psychology who study the minutiae of gossip and the complexity of this most convoluted code of communication. It is credited with ensuring organisational cohesiveness, social identity and psychological belonging while the ethologists say it is the modern bonding equivalent of the group grooming behaviour of primates.
Gossip has been described as a genetic programme, an atavistic necessity, a throwback to the time when it was essential for survival to know the whereabouts, activities, motivations and intentions of the neighbouring tribe. It was a way of asserting affiliation and kinship, cementing the crew by the things they knew, a programme for networking, information control and the establishment of hierarchies of those in the know.
Gossipers are the gatekeepers of important information, the assessors of reputations and the reinforcers of shared values. Gossip blurs the lines between private and public, fact and fiction and forces us to examine our interpretation of the world by who we are and what we say.
Corporate psychology suggests that gossip contributes to the ideological identity of the workforce, the organisational grapevine, shared shop talk, formation of alliances and denigrators of competitors. And for those excluded from organisational status, gossip is a communication currency that confers conspiratorial connection between the less powerful at work.
Gossip is a power tool for the proliferation of propaganda about powerful people in society. It does this in a seductive exclusionary way that entices the reader's attention. This is typified by the rhetorical "guess who is going out with whom?" while access to the catalogue of celebrity attendance at fashionable functions conveys the impression to consumers that somehow they too were there, or if not actually there, at least privy to the secret details of the event. Additionally, the tabloids trade on the demise of deities, the idols we construct are deconstructed, scrutinised by a sentence reassuring us mere mortals when we see how the mighty have fallen.
From the sociological perspective, gossip is what glues communities together. One study suggests that gossip can decree the moral code of a community. By identifying the errors of others, it specifies the boundaries of behaviour. Gossip is often the conveyor of censure.
In examining the difference between gossip and information exchange, research shows that men and women engage equally in communication and analysis of the goings on of their companions, colleagues and circle of friends. But the tone, intensity, animation and feedback are what make women's conversations referred to as gossip while men reportedly refer to this activity as informational exchange. But for both men and women, gossip requires a "triad" of participants: a gossiper, an audience and a third party who is being gossiped about, all of whom must know each other.
And what about the gossip of the Gael? Our own Celtic tradition laid great emphasis on storytelling. Weaving itself in myth and legend it conjured up imaginary locals of eternal youth and characters of absolute wisdom. The survival of the oral tradition was linked to the special status of the Seanchaí or story-teller, whose activity pointed to the significance of the spoken word in recounting our history, sustaining and containing our knowledge, our identity, ourselves.
But there was another "story-telling" subculture, signified by squinting windows, twitching curtains and the capacity to convey by a curl of the lip the condemnation of the community.
These were the inveterate, invidious and vindictive invigilators of the loves and lives of others. Indeed, it must have been from these gorgons of gossip that the traditional seanfhocal "Dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi, gur chuala sí bean á rá" - the classic she said that she said that she heard, the Chinese whispers of the Celtic community.
And this is where clinical psychology parts company with anthropological explanations, sociological solutions or the benefits of corporate cohesion through gossip. This is where it recalls the lives destroyed by a lie, damaged by truths best left untold, the havoc of psychological denigration and defamation.
This is the critical factor in the 1963 novel by Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is the series of humiliating revelations and betrayed confidences with the final unfolding that one couple's beloved 21-year-old son is purely imaginary - this suffering in a sentence summarises the story.
Gratuitous gossip is confessional calumny, the slaughter of reputations, the death of marriages and the trauma of social exclusion. It is indecent exposure of human vulnerability and frailty and too many clinicians see too many people whose lives have been wrenched by words.
• Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview.