Why Do People Love to Gossip?

Time: 10:30 - 12:00, March 21 (Friday)

Venue: TxC102

Language: English

Abstract:

Gossip, conversations about the private life of an absent third party, pervades our daily lives, ranging from chitchatting about a neighbor’s family life, spreading a colleague’s scandal, to blabbering about the royal family. People gossip for several reasons. Beyond well-studied explanations, we discover an underexplored reason: tellers overestimate the extent to which gossiping encourages listeners’ self-disclosure.

Biography 

Dr. Jingyi Lu is a Professor at the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, and serves as the Department Chair of the Department of Social and Managerial Psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Peking University. Her research focuses on judgment and decision-making, with current interests in self-other decision-making differences and prediction biases. She aims to explore ways to promote rational decision-making from both theoretical and applied perspectives. Her work has been published in journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, and Acta Psychologica Sinica (心理学报).