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By Mark van Vugt & Anjana Ahuja
Putin is a virtual mafia boss, Nicolas Sarkozy is authoritarian and unpredictable, and Colonel Gadafi is attracted to blonde Ukranian nurses. Well, that's according to WikiLeaks, which has spilt the details from a new string of classified cables. In fact, not one of these tidbits is a bombshell. So why our fascination with revelations containing information that is already known? The answer is that it is private information about public people and we crave it. We always have. The internet is not to blame, although this medium greatly helps disseminate these "secrets" to a worldwide audience. No, it is simply human nature. We humans love gossip, especially about the powerful, the famous and the rich.
Gossip around the camp fire
Twas ever thus. In our evolutionary past, early humans formed groups to survive and as these groups grew they needed leaders to organize their activities. But how could they trust someone to lead them in the right direction? And once in place how would they know these people would not abuse their power? Our ancestors hit upon the solution: gossip. Through talking we can exchange information about people who are not there. Around 75% of what we say concerns other people and there is an interesting difference between men and women. Men gossip to make themselves look better ("Did you know I was better at school than him?") whereas women gossip to make others look worse ("Did you know that Mary sleeps around?"). So beloved were our ancestors of gossip, argues Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar, that it drove the evolution of language.
Gossiping about the virtues and, more importantly, the vices of leaders enabled our forebears to keep them in check. Remember that in our ancestral past there was no distinction between the public and private face of a leader and so any news was regarded as useful. Political leaders know this and so they are always tempted to ban, or if this is not possible, to control the media (Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi owns various TV and radio channels).
STOP it
In our new book "Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership" we refer to gossip and other such leveling mechanisms as STOPs, strategies to overcome the powerful. STOPS such as gossip are necessary because without them leaders are prone to abuse their privileged position. Indeed, a snippet of gossip around the water cooler at the office works wonders against an overbearing manager, because it instills a fear of being found out. How many scandalous business practices would have gone unnoticed without people like ENRON-whistleblower Sherron Watkins?
Power Corrupts
Lord Acon famously said "Power tends to corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely." In a classic psychology experiment in the 1970s individuals were asked to supervise groups of students working on a task. Some leaders got the power to praise whereas others got the power to praise and to punish. Although the experiment was set up in such a way that all groups did equally well, the punitive leader used his power more often than necessary. That power corrupts, therefore, might be the natural way of things, something we share with our primate cousins (just look at the bossy silverback Gorilla alpha male).
In a clever little experiment psychologist Adam Galinsky and colleagues (2006) showed that when people were asked to imagine themselves in a position of power and then they had to write the letter "E" on their forehead so that other people could read it, many failed (the people primed with power were three times as likely as normal participants to write on their forehead what looked like a reflected E to others). Powerful people simply did not understand that they have to take the perspective of their followers. Another study by our Dutch colleagues, David De Cremer and Eric Van Dijk (2005) showed that people who were randomly assigned to a powerful position filched considerably more money from the group fund.
Power reduces empathy and increases corruption and this is a serious problem if we want our politicians to look after our interests and achieve world peace.
So the next time you read a new gobbet from WikiLeaks concerning a womanizing European ambassador or a petulant Arab foreign minister, remind yourself that gossip is a sign of a healthy democracy and that without it our leaders are more likely to serve their own interests rather than ours.
