Functions
Gossip can:
- reinforce – or punish the lack of – morality and accountability;
- reveal passive aggression, isolating and harming others;
- serve as a process of social grooming, building a sense of community with shared interests, information, and values;
- begin a courtship that helps one find their desired mate, by counseling others; or,
- provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information in organizations.
Read more about this topic: Gossip
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)