Ti-ti-ti… Gossip as a teaching tool

I wrote this article in 2010 in Portuguese when I was involved in distance learning, and from time to time, I revisit it because… it is great. Today, I’ve decided to summarize it in a post in English.

As teachers find themselves in a constant battle for their students’ attention In a world overloaded with information because of technology devices, they forget that there exists a timeless tool that has been honed by natural selection over thousands of years and remains highly effective in capturing attention—not just of students, but of everyone’s: gossip!

To make a point, I tell an anecdote:

“I had an anthropologist friend with whom I always discussed science. At the time, I was a doctoral student in Biophysics at UFRJ, and she was a master’s student in Social Medicine at UERJ. She had started studying biology at Unicamp but soon switched to sociology and specialized in anthropology. It’s been a long time since I last saw her. She is incredibly intelligent and always had read a new book or watched an interesting movie, and I learned a lot from her. She was also beautiful, which helped, though it wasn’t enough for us to spend hours talking about various subjects. But I, who also liked reading books and watching interesting movies, had things to say to her and was surprised when she was outraged by my suggestion that certain human behaviors are clearly inherited from our animal ancestors. I had more than a crush on her, but it didn’t work out, more than once. Today she is married and has a beautiful daughter.”

The reason why It is almost impossible not to want to know more about the story that gossip works. Evolutionary psychology has shown that nothing attracts our attention more than stories about other people’s lives. Because I shared a bit of my life, I gained more of your attention to the aspects of the discussion between ‘genetics and culture’ (nature x nurture) than if I had started the article with a synthesis of the debates between Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman.

“You may have never noticed, but no conversation between people who know each other well—whether they are colleagues, relatives, or old friends—lingers longer than necessary on a topic that is not about behavior, ambitions, motives, character flaws, or love affairs of known people. Whether they are present or, especially, absent.”

Ridley, 1993

If you are a teacher, I am sure you have struggled many times in the classroom to maintain your students’ attention. If you are a student, you have undoubtedly faced the same problem from the other angle: how difficult it is to pay attention in class all the time.

And as everyone has been a student at some point, I am sure you can recall an experience where your attention wandered far, far away from what the teacher was saying.

Especially in schools, it seems our desire for equitability between genders is partly to blame. Behavioral neuroscience has proven many differences in the brains of men and women. For example, “depth perception is more accentuated in men, while the field of view is greater in women.” These differences influence behavior. It is not because boys are conditioned that they prefer cars and girls prefer dolls. From the early days of life, girls are more interested in smiling, communicating, and people, while boys are interested in action and things. We invent toys that fit these pre-established preferences (dolls and footballs). The toy industry, concerned with sales profits and not anthropological theories, knows this very well. But teachers insist on treating boys and girls as equals in school.

During the Pleistocene, in Africa, to be good hunters, “men developed spatial skills such as throwing weapons at moving targets, making tools, and finding their way home.” Meanwhile, women, to find roots, mushrooms, berries, and plants, needed to have a greater and more detailed perception of their surroundings. Despite the culture and technology changes since then, little or nothing has changed in this aspect.

The key element in the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings. Humans competed more with each other than with any other species or environmental conditions. If Tooby and Cosmides (1992) are correct about us having mental modules for each task and instinct, then among the modules selected to increase in size with the brain’s growth is the ‘theory of mind’ module. This module allows us to form an opinion about others’ thoughts, along with another module that enables us to express these thoughts.

“Language is the most recent of our mental abilities and also, perhaps for that reason, the most human, differentiating us the most from other primates.”

Pinker & Bloom, 1992

Children can infer grammatical rules even without any instruction, a task that the most modern computers are incapable of performing without prior instruction. This ability for language learning, like many brain functions, is an instinct to learn.

If our Pleistocene brain evolved to respond to the questions: ‘What would I do if I were in his place?’ and ‘What will he do next?’, then nothing is better than gossip to teach us about the lives of others. The magazine Caras, an icon of gossip dealing with the private and professional lives of celebrities, is sold in five countries and three continents. In 1991, when it was created in Argentina, it became number one in sales within just one quarter, achieving the same mark a year later in Brazil and four years later in Portugal.

According to the commercial directorate of Rede Globo, the largest producer of soap operas in Brazil, “The telenovela is part of the daily life of 29 million people. Few programs in the world can gather so many viewers.” According to the same source, Brazil has 50.5 million households with TV. Of the total people who use TV for entertainment, distraction, information, or simply as company, 70% watch telenovelas.

Even if teachers are new, they do not use technological tools and cannot capture the attention of students dispersed in a world saturated with information. The phenomenon observed primarily in face-to-face teaching has been challenged by various initiatives. The most comprehensive and immediate initiative is by Cristine Barreto, coordinator of the production nucleus for printed teaching material for distance education at MEC.

“A teacher can put everything into the printed teaching material, but he himself cannot go with the book. The most difficult thing for the teacher is to put himself into the material, to use a more personal, even affective, language. And this is more important for students to overcome the physical and emotional distance barrier that hinders learning”

Barreto (2007)

The greatest difficulty for teachers in using language closer to students is the thin line between achieving a clear, precise, cohesive, and informal text and ending up with an intimate, infantilized, or vulgar text. Writers have always known that less elaborate text is more suitable for the reader. Historians were the first to realize they could use gossip to teach. The truth is, to compete with all other sources of information, or merely distraction, to which students are subjected all the time, everywhere, the tool is much older, tested, and approved by thousands of years of natural selection: “Let me tell you what I just heard…”

Incorporating gossip and personal stories into educational practices can significantly enhance student engagement and retention of information. By leveraging our natural inclination towards gossip and storytelling, educators can create a more captivating and effective learning environment.