It will be argued that an interest in the affairs of same-sex others is especially strong among females, and that this is not always benign. I review the evidence that women are more likely than men to use gossip in an aggressive, competitive manner, with the goal being to exclude competitors from their social group and damage the competitor’s ability to maintain a reliable social network of her own.
Understanding the dynamics of competitive gossip may also give us insight into related social phenomena such as how people use social media such as Facebook and why males and females often have such different entertainment tastes when it comes to movies and television.
