For my book Life in Five Senses, I explored how we can make our lives happier, healthier, more creative, and more productive by paying closer attention to our five senses. What a joy it was to write that book!

It’s funny—no matter what we’re aiming to achieve, we can use our five senses to help us achieve it, even when the things we want are in opposite directions. We can use our five sense to calm down, or to rev up. We can use them to help us think creatively or to power through drudge work. We can use them to give ourselves comfort or to give ourselves excitement.

As part of the work of that book, of course I explored our sense of hearing, which includes listening to other people—one of the very most important things we do with our senses. And I got interested in the subject of gossip.

There’s an old saying, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”—but that’s not quite true. Gossip, or talking about people who aren’t present, is a ubiquitous feature of human communication. We spend about an hour each day gossiping.

Gossip has a bad reputation; people assume that by gossiping, we spread hurtful rumors or waste time. But gossip serves many important social function. It helps us feel closer to each other. It helps us understand the values of our community. It unifies people who play by the rules and exposes misbehavior. It helps us cooperate. Often, most gossip is neutral in tone—just newsy.  Only about 15% of gossip involves negative judgment.

Also, gossip is fun. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” is associated with pleasure, cooperation, and positive feelings. When people engage in gossip, their oxytocin levels increases significantly in comparison to emotional non-gossip conversation.

Of course, gossip can also be terrible; it can cause damage, conflict, anxiety, and misinformation. I don’t want to minimize these negative consequences.

But it’s helpful to recognize that in its positive form, it plays an important part in human relations.

In in the past, when I’d share information about someone, I sometimes felt guilty, like it was always bad to talk about someone who wasn’t present. Now I understand that if information is neutral and not private, sharing information in a social network has many positive effects.

We care about other people! And we love to hear about what they do, say, and think. So we eagerly trade gossip.