Is gossiping considered a deviant behavior?
I beleive as common and widespread as gossip actually IS, it remains a deviant behavior. Any gossip undermines the security a person feels in a relationship. If you gossip to ME about “X”, then I can be reasonably certain that you will talk about ME to someone else. While I dont really care what you say about me, I DO care about my own choices of who I let into my world. A gossiper is NOT one I choose to invite or remain in my life. Finally, a person who gossips feels insecure, unable or unwilling to look at their own lives and focuses on others, repeating or starting crap that may or may not even be true. They underestimate or dont even care if this hurts someone else or not. Given this, you can understand why I would exclude a gossip from my life.
I don’t think gossiping, as harmful as it can be, is a deviant behavior. I think it’s an important behavior for a vocal, social species. It’s a means of communicating what expected behavior in a group is, particularly in situations where codified laws aren’t in place or aren’t applicable. It lets whoever’s being gossiped about know that their actions aren’t acceptable (because it always gets back to people), and, more importantly, it lets the people gossiping know what’s expected of them. If you’re with a group and they start gossiping about what A did, and everyone agrees that it was just wretched, then you all know perfectly well that, whatever A did, you shouldn’t do. Yeah, it can certainly be harmful, especially in middle and high school and also in adult society. It’s a difficult issue in a society like ours, which is insanely complicated anyway, plus we’ve gone through a hell of a lot of cultural change over the past 50-100 years which we’re still dealing with, and we’ve got a lo
