Gossip – talking about relevant others in their absence – is believed to constitute
a large part of informal communication. The perception of the prevalence of gossip
implies that it can be unambiguously identified and distinguished from other topics
in spontaneous conversation. Its distinctiveness may be justified by multiple theoretical
perspectives, including one that describes in-group gossip as an informal device for
enforcing norms and punishing norm violators, and another that claims that gossip
is used to release frustration and communicate envy. If the ultimate reason for gossip
is to facilitate social bonding between the sender and the receiver, however, this
would not differentiate gossip from other conversational topics that provide social
enjoyment, such as entertainment and food. In a novel contribution, we explore the
topics included in a corpus containing 550 hours of unfiltered spontaneous conversation
and identify using LDA topic modeling whether some topics are unambiguously prominent
in in-group gossip. The explorative approach is integrated with the manual annotation
of instances of gossip across the entire corpus. We identified coherent topics of
in-group gossip that are clearly different from those of small talk and storytelling.
Our analysis finds that feelings, intentions, and opinions are frequently expressed
in in-group gossip, more than habits, manners, and behavior. In-group gossip topics
are characterized by more words associated with anger, in line with theoretical perspectives
that attribute the motives of norm enhancement and punishment or frustration and envy
to gossip.
