Personal Information Sharing: Essays on Antecedents and Consequences of Gossip

Understanding when and why people gossip, i.e., exchange personal information about others, is the topic of this PhD dissertation. Gossip has long been considered by academic researchers as a fundamental human behavior (Foster 2004, Dunbar 2004). In this dissertation, I develop a re-conceptualization of gossip and investigate both the antecedents and the consequences of this phenomenon. In the first essay, I focus on the antecedents of gossip and investigate why people gossip more about some subjects than others. I focus on the relationships between the members of the gossip-triad: the sharer (A), the absent subject (B) and the receiver (C), and propose that gossip depends on the sharer’s relationship with the subject of the content (who the information is about). Gossip involves a combination of two opposing concerns that vary based on the type of relationship with the absent subject: the perceived guilt associated with sharing something presumably private versus the perceived excitement of sharing juicy and secret content. Building on Emerson’s (1962) Power-Dependence theory, I distinguish between different types of (A-B) relationships varying across two dimensions: mutual influence and balance. Mutual influence is the overall degree of reciprocal influence in a relationship; balance is how this influence is distributed. Across five studies, I find that personal information about celebrities (as opposed to other people) is mostly shared because consumers experience lower guilt and higher excitement. In addition, the propensity to gossip about celebrities remains higher even varying the relationships with the audience (A-C and B-C). The second essay focuses on re-conceptualizing gossip. Across the gossiping literature, there is lack of a clear definition and conceptualization of the behavior. Following MacInnis’ (2011) guidance on conceptual development, I perform a systematic and a conceptual review of existing literature and research on gossip. In the systematic review, I analyze all the empirical and theoretical evidence in the gossip domain to describe what is known and more importantly what remains still unexplained. I provide a set of recommendations centering on definition clarity, contexts and methods that I suggest as ways for researchers to evaluate what gossip is and provide meaningful investigations of this behavior. In the conceptual review, I describe, map, and define the gossip entity by identifying the fundamental gossip characteristics. I provide a new comprehensive definition of gossip rooted in the extant literature and based on the gossip-triad. I further propose a grounded theory research design to validate my re-conceptualization and investigate the role of the members gossip-triad (sender A, absent subject B, and receiver C). In the third essay, I take a marketing perspective and investigates the gossip industry, which is a big market that remains largely unexplored by marketing research. To do this, I focus on the key subjects in this large business which are, in fact, celebrities. I start from the premise that gossip is foundational in the relationships that famous individuals build with their fans, as it is one of the primary sources of information that consumers use to build and relate to the celebrity image. By being in control of personal information, celebrities can strategically self-disclose information themselves, or let others diffuse personal content about them without intervening (i.e., via gossip). Across four studies, I compare gossip with self-disclosure and find that consumers share self-disclosed content more compared to content received from a third-party (i.e., gossip). Despite this, unexpectedly, negative information delivered via gossip (vs. self-disclosed) increases consumer’s liking and appreciation of the celebrity, especially as an endorser. I aim at offering useful insights for human brands and their managers on how to deal with personal information sharing and gossip.