More than one’s negative ties: The role of friends’ antipathies in high school gossip

Gossip is universal, and multiple studies have demonstrated that it can have beneficial group-level outcomes when negative reports help identify defectors or norm-violators. Gossip, however, seldom happens in a social vacuum. Instead, it is enmeshed in a fabric of positive and negative relationships that creates opportunities, constraints, and also motives to gossip. This article studies the importance of friendships and antipathies among the three concerned parties (sender, receiver, target) for negative gossip among adolescents. We contrast two theoretical accounts. According to the first, gossip brings closer individuals who have “enemies” in common. Based on this, we infer that gossip appears in triads where both the sender and receiver share their antipathy against the target. The second position argues that gossip is used to compromise different opinions of friends towards the target. Thus, what predicts gossip is direct antipathy against the target or being friends with someone who dislikes the target (indirect antipathy) rather than the combination of the two antipathies. We test these two lines of reasoning with sociometric data from 17 classroom observations (13 unique classrooms in different time points) in Hungary. Bayesian Exponential Random Graph Models yield support for direct antipathy in 13 (nine unique) classrooms and indirect antipathy in five. No evidence for shared antipathy is found. Results suggest that, at least among adolescents, negative gossip is not about bonding with potential allies but more about consensus-making between friends. Also, results reveal that negative gossip concentrates on the two ends of the reputational echelon, hinting that, in the classroom, high reputation might be contested instead of rewarded.