Hot Gossip & Hotter Findings

A LOOK INTO THE INTIMATE GOSSIP NETWORK OF A COLLEGE CREW TEAM, AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THEM.

FIG 01 A completely made-up dream chart that depicts a network map connecting my personal hook-ups to those of Seth Rogens.

I’ve always been a huge fan of gossip. Growing up, I spent my summers at an overnight camp so naturally there was a lot of “hot goss” to go around. Granted, we were never interested in baseless rumours—we only cared about the gossip if it were actually true. My camp was part of a youth movement with five other camps across North America, so when we discovered that Seth Rogen had attended one of our sister camps, connecting ourselves to him through gossip became an, albeit impossible, obsession. Once I got into graphic design, the dream became to map data to visualize these social connections.
While I don’t have access to that camp data (and can’t really pursue it due to privacy concerns), I came across this dataset surveying 45 people on the men’s and women’s crew team at a small liberal arts college in the U.S. Though all the data was self-reported, it’s rich with extensive social intel: who gossips about whom, who’s friends with whom, who’s hooked up with whom, and even who’s sabotaging others. Participants also completed the R-UCLA Loneliness and Well-Being Scales, which gives us intriguing insight into how relationship and emotional health intersect. While studying my own personal relationships would’ve been my dream project, this dataset provides a revealing look into the effects of gossip on our lives.

FIG 02Source: Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset

Note: Includes 45 participants of a liberal arts college crew team, 24 women and 21 men.

Note: Suzie’s name is anonymized but her data represents 1 of the female participants and her positive and negative gossip scores.

To ground the analysis, I decided to follow one particularly prolific gossiper—let’s call her Suzie. Suzie has gossiped about nearly everyone, mentioning 37 of her teammates positively and only throwing shade at one person. There’s a lot we can assume about this information, remembering that it is self-reported, she may just have opted out of admitting to negative gossip. But how it seems is that Suzie may also just be the team’s reigning social butterfly, connecting to almost everyone through kind words. We may wonder about her being a captain, or just a team-player who loves everyone. You’d assume this means she’s really well loved, but when I flipped the perspective, things got interesting.

FIG 03Source: Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset

Note: Includes 45 participants of a liberal arts college crew team, 24 women and 21 men.

Note: Suzie’s name is anonymized but this data represents all occurrences of the participants positive and negative gossip towards 1 specific female participant.

Suzie was definitely a popular topic herself—but not in the way you might hope. While 12 people had something nice to say about her, twice that number, 24, spoke negatively. It’s a reminder that being socially active can make you visible—but not always in the way you intend.

FIG 05

Source: Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset
Note: Includes 45 participants of a liberal arts college crew team, 24 women and 21 men.
Note: Data combines both positive and negative gossip.

This visibility ties directly into gendered assumptions about gossip. Gossip is often seen as a “women’s activity,” yet the data starts to complicate that. Spoiler alert: Suzie wasn’t the top gossiper overall—just the top woman. Here I combined the positive and negative gossip data to find the total that each individual person gossiped. Three men out-gossiped Suzie, with the most talkative man mentioning 38 people compared to Suzie’s 33. On average, men gossiped about 25.3 people, while women averaged only 18.8. This isn’t just a statistical blip—it suggests that men are actually the ones who gossip more, yet they aren’t culturally tagged as “gossips” in the same way women are. Social expectations may shape not only how we perceive gossip but also how people report and experience it.

Then we can also think about who is the subject of all of this gossip. When I mapped out the total number of people being gossiped about, a clear gender divide emerged: men were found to be the bigger gossip sources but much less so were they the subjects. For women, the trend reversed—they weren’t gossiping nearly as much but were far more likely to be the ones talked about. This imbalance speaks volumes about how social narratives are constructed. Men shape the conversations, while women become the story. Gossip is about much more than just chatter, it’s about power and visibility, and controlling whose stories get told.

FIG 06

Source: Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset
Note: Data combines both positive and negative gossip.

But what about the emotional consequences? Gossiping has long been demonized, primarily due to our historical patriarchal roots, and so it’s been assumed that gossiping must be bad for us as individuals and as a collective. In reality, gossiping is about fostering social connections, so we can look to this dataset to help us find some answers by finding a way to compare how much we gossip to the loneliness and well-being scales.

FIG 07 Source: Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset
Note: Includes 45 participants of a liberal arts college crew team, 24 women and 21 men.
Note: Study uses the R-UCLA Loneliness Scale and the Well-Being Scale.

The data on the left shows us that the more someone gossips, the less lonely they feel—a universal truth, regardless of gender. However, when I looked deeper into emotional well-being, the results diverged. For women, gossip correlates strongly with improved well-being, as if connecting through talk helps women process emotions, bond with others, and reinforce social ties. I love this quote by Sam-George Allen from her book Witches, that perfectly sums up this experience.

“I have surrounded myself, by luck and by design, with women who ask a lot of me, who give a lot to me, who are willing to sit at my kitchen table and argue with me for hours until we both have straightened out how we see the world, how we think the world should be.”

For men though, gossiping more seems to decline their emotional well-being. While it kept loneliness at bay, their well-being scores dipped as their gossiping increased. This finding raises questions about how men and women experience social interactions differently. Is it because men are less socially conditioned to use gossip as a bonding tool? Or because the cultural narrative around gossip still paints it as frivolous or “feminine,” making men’s participation more stressful or shame-inducing?
The emotional stakes of gossip seem to run deeper than expected. Gossip isn’t just a social activity, it’s a form of emotional labour, where sharing, listening, and managing relationships carry psychological weight. For women, participating in gossip might serve as a release—a way to process social dynamics and build intimacy. For men, gossip might feel like a breach of emotional norms they aren’t supposed to cross, adding social tension rather than relieving it.
These findings challenge assumptions about who gossips, why they do it, and what they get out of it. Gossip may be messy, but it’s also deeply human—connecting, isolating, and shaping us in unexpected ways. It’s a reminder that talking about others isn’t just a pastime, it’s how we navigate relationships, define social hierarchies, and even make sense of ourselves.

IMAGE SOURCES All images and charts created by Deborah Khodanovich unless otherwise stated.

CITATIONS
“A Concurrent Validational Study of the NCHS General Well-Being Schedule.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/13079. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

Russell, Dan, et al. “UCLA loneliness scale.” PsycTESTS Dataset, 1978, https://doi.org/10.1037/t05974-000.

Porter, Alice. “Why Is Gossiping Demonised When It’s Actually Empowering?” Gossiping Is More Empowering Than We Think, www.refinery29.com/en-gb/gossip-friendship-celebrity-power-accountability. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

Ravenscraft, Eric. “Why Talking about Our Problems Helps so Much (and How to Do It).” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/smarter-living/talking-out-problems.html.

Yucel, Meltem, et al. Gossip, Sabotage, and Friendship Network Dataset, 19 June 2020, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/m6tsx.

Written and designed in the RISD Graphic Design course Grad Elective: Data Narratives under supervision of Reuben Fischer-Baum.

Petersborough, England, 1980s
Photograph by Chris Porsz