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Feel a twinge of guilt about watching a salacious TV soap, or buying a gossipy celebrity magazine?
Don't.
Tell yourself instead that you are merely honouring a highly respectable ancestral survival mechanism.
Psychologists in Scotland devised a mind test similar to the game known as "Chinese whispers," the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.
They gave 10 volunteers four different texts to read, and then asked them to write down what they could remember. Their efforts were then passed to another set of volunteers as passages for them to learn, and the process was repeated four times.
The final version of the texts was then compared against the original -- and the researchers found that "gossip-like" information, involving deception and infidelity and the interactions of other people, was most easily remembered and transmitted with the most accuracy.
In contrast, the volunteers were much less able to recall purely descriptive information about individuals or their surroundings.
The results suggest that humans attach a high importance to personal and social data.
The possible reason: Finding out other people's private lives and interactions is a key survival mechanism.
Homo sapiens is a species that lives in groups, so it is essential for individuals to learn what other members of the tribe are up to and what this means in terms of risks and interest.
"If primate intelligence originally evolved to solve complex social problems, such as keeping track of shifting coalitions or countering against deception, then it's possible that present-day human intelligence carries a legacy of this selection history, here expressed as a bias in memory for social information," University of St. Andrews researcher Alex Mesoudi said.
This need-to-know could explain the enduring popularity of soap operas and other gossipy media, the team believes.
The findings are to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.
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AFP 151231 GMT 02 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
