To examine this, researchers created an online game to examine the role of gossip and how it manifests as information becomes more uncertain within the game.
Participants played 10 rounds of the game together in six-person groups.
In each round, players were given $10 and could choose to keep the money or invest any portion of it into a group fund that was multiplied by one and a half and divided equally among the players.
The game creates an inherent tension between selfish freeriding and cooperative behaviour, and is considered what researchers refer to as a public goods game.
In some conditions, information was restricted so that participants could only observe the behaviour of a few other players in their group.
In some games, players could privately chat with another player in the group.
This allowed players to relay information about other players' behaviour to their partner, such as whether another player was freeriding.
Afterwards, players reported their willingness to play with each player again.
Gossip not just 'baseless trash talk'
The findings reveal that the participants who chatted with each other felt the most connected with each other at the end of the game and even shared similar impressions of the other players in their group.
Gossip should not be relegated to just "baseless trash talk", the researchers concluded.
Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, commented: "Most of the content of gossip is on the whole rather positive than negative.
"It plays an important role in facilitating and building relationships within communities.
"One direct way it does this is simply the declaration of commitment. 'I'm here talking with you rather than Jim down the road. You are much more worth investing my precious time in'.
"The bottom line is, that is how we build friendship, and friendship has huge knock on consequences for both our mental and physical health.
"If you don't invest time hanging over the garden fence, engaged in idle conversation with your friends, you won't have any."
Lockdown hasn't stifled need for gossip
Despite much of our conversation now relegated to online Zoom meetings, people's appetite for gossip has not diminished, according to other experts.
Francesca Happé, professor of cognitive neuroscience at King's College London, said: "I think one of the things that is really interesting about the paper is the time that we find ourselves in.
"[In the study] We have little groups of six people, performing a task online and who have never met each other can begin to build up these social bonds over relatively trivial exchanges of information.
"We are all worried about losing our social connections, living as we are under lockdown, but it does remind us that humans are very flexible and very socially minded."
