People Overestimate How Much Gossiping Encourages Listeners’ Self-Disclosure

Gossip is ubiquitous. People gossip for several reasons. Beyond well-studied explanations, we propose an underexplored reason: tellers overestimate the extent to which gossiping encourages listeners’ self-disclosure. This overestimation is observed for gossip but not for nongossip, and for self-disclosure but not for disclosing information unrelated to oneself. We also document that tellers’ overestimation arises because tellers (vs. listeners) focus more on the trust that they convey to listeners by gossiping, whereas listeners (vs. tellers) focus more on their concerns about being the target of gossip in the future. This study identifies a novel misprediction and contributes to the literature on gossip by revealing a new motivation underlying gossiping. Practically, it provides an effective debiasing approach to mitigate tellers’ overestimation and consequently manage gossip.