Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Early studies of gender differences in discourse (e.g., Johnson, 1994;Jones, 1980) have drawn attention to the depreciation of women's discourse, which has often been associated with gossip, i.e., casual, idle chat about intimate or domestic topics.Recent efforts have been made, however, to overcome this normative approach and to investigate the goals and functions that gossip may serve among men and women, such as status and achievement with males or relationship maintenance with females (Watson, 2012).This focus on motivations for gossiping has also led some research to leave aside the question of possible gender differences (e.g., Beersma & Van Kleef, 2012;Feinberg, Willer, Stellar, & Keltner, 2012;Wert & Salovey, 2004) and, even more, the question of how men and women regard the other sex's discourse.If women's gossip is discounted, attacked, and derogated by men (Jones, 1980), empirical data is still to be found to support this assertion.To our knowledge, in the past decades no research has attempted to investigate empirically men's and women's reactions to women's gossip.One rea- Who cares about women's talk? A field experiment LUBOMIR LAMY, NICOLAS GUÉGUEN and JACQUES FISCHER-LOKOUThis study investigates reactions to female talk.Despite stereotypic knowledge of female talk as gossip, empirical data is lacking as to whether it may influence behavior.In a natural setting, participants (126 men and 124 women) unwittingly overheard a conversation about love or do-it-yourself.Results showed that the semantic content of the conversation had an effect on female listeners' interest and later helping behavior, whereas it had no effect on male listeners.Contrary to previous findings, males did not display chivalrous helping.These findings may be related to males' perception of female talk and to automatic goal processing.
Language: English
Topic: Gender Studies in Language
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2097886779