This article shows that bullying and an attempt to curb it is not a new issue. Let's see how this author recommends we deal with it...

In a Midwestern town, not long ago, tongues began to wag about the teen-age daughter of a prominent citizen. Gloria had been seen, according to the gossips, getting out ot a young man's car at seven in the morning, with her evening clothes askew, and staggering up the steps of her home. The story buzzed around town, gathering details as it went. There was talk of a wild week-end house party at a nearby college. The town drew the inevitable inference and treated Gloria accordingly - with stares and silence. A few weeks later the girl, her spirit broken, wrote in her diary: "I am not what they say. I would rather die." Then she took a lethal dose of sleeping pills.

Every year countless lives are damaged and untold misery is caused by malicious gossip. Almost every one of us has suffered from it. And yet we continue to talk irresponsibly about other people.

Dr. Gordon Allport, professor of psychology at Harvard — who did brilliant work during the war tracking down and destroying dangerous enemy-inspired rumors — has devised an ingenious method of tracing in the classroom the development of a rumor. The first of a group of subjects is shown a picture flashed on a screen — the scene of an automobile accident, for example, or a street brawl. He then, in front of the class, describes the picture—which has now been blacked out—to a subject who has been waiting outside. Number two recounts what he heard to a third, the third to a fourth, and so on until the description of the picture has gone through the ears, minds and mouths of half a dozen people in exactly the way that gossip travels.

The subject who tells the final version to the class—with his back to the picture which is now again flashed on the screen—usually gets a laugh from the students who have listened to the distortions injected by each reporter as he has passed the story along. The final version and the picture itself are rarely very similar. In one of Dr. Allport’s experiments — the scene of a brawl in which a white man is threatening a Negro with a razor—the razor invariably winds up in the colored man’s hand after the second or third telling.

By tests on several thousand people and the investigation of hundreds of individual cases of rumor, Dr. Allport, Dr. Hadley Cantril of Princeton and a number of other psychologists have been able to chart the behavior of various types of gossip. Most persons who start derogatory gossip, these investigators find, are motivated by hate, fear, envy, the desire to seem important, and sexual repression with a resulting vicious interest in the sex activities of others. Rarely does righteous indignation, which slanderers so often pretend, spark a derogatory rumor. Gloria was condemned not so much because of her “escapade” as for her good looks, prominence and wealth.

As a popular rumor develops, it usually goes through three stages — which the psychologists call “leveling,” “sharpening” and assimilation.” During the leveling period the gossip takes the raw material of the story and chops off — either through malice, ignorance or simply a desire to entertain — any explanations which might decrease the effectiveness of the neat little news package the he or she has in mind. In Gloria’s case the other girls in the car and the obvious middle age of the man who was driving were leveled out.

The next group of gossips then takes the leveled, easily told story and “sharpens” it, magnifying its salient points so that it becomes an attention getter at the beauty parlor or the general store. Gloria’s prom, for example, became a week-end house party at a fraternity.

In the “assimilation” stage the story gets its final stature from the imagination, prejudices and emotional reactions of the whole community. Gloria’s week-end had been so leveled and sharpened that it took the imagination of the strict, repressed little community by storm. The orgy at the college was a typical fabrication contributed by people who wished they could have attended one themselves.

All this happens with incredible speed. Dr. Hadley Cantril of Princeton ran a series of experiments to determine the velocity of gossip. In one he told six students in strict confidence that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were coming to the next university dance. A survey one week later showed that the completely fictitious story had reached no less than 2000 students. Town officials had called the university demanding to know why they had not been informed of the forthcoming visit, and press agencies were frantically telephoning for details. “And that was a pleasant rumor,” says Dr. Cantril. “A slanderous rumor travels even faster.”

Gossip knows no distinction of educational level or income bracket. The country club produces slander as vicious as that of the corner drugstore and the bar and grill. A medical friend of mine who practices in a fashionable suburban district told me about one of his patients, a prosperous builder. After shooting a poor game of golf one day, this outspoken man unburdened himself to a friend in the locker room about various business worries and what he called his “high blood pressure.” Tired and depressed, he made his financial position and his health sound far worse than they really were; both his business and his heart were actually in excellent condition.

Within the hour the card room had it that “poor old T.J.” was broke and had serious heart condition. A few days later he had trouble at his bank. “We think you’re overexpanding, Ton,” said a friendly but firm vice-president. “You ought to take it a bit easy. You’re not looking too well, you know.” Then a cold that laid him up for a few days was reported as a heart attack. “And so,” explained the doctor, “they whispered him into it. When he came to me he was suffering from a general nervous condition and resulting heart strain. He’ll be all right; his heart and his business are doing fine. But he has suffered plenty.”

The doctor’s favorite example of the cruel twists that gossip can take is what he calls with a wry smile the Case of the Grecian Gown. “It would have been funny,” he says, “if it hadn’t nearly wrecked two very worth-while people.” The young and attractive wife of a local minister had been seen, the country club had it, dancing in the moonlight on the Parish House lawn in a filmy Grecian gown. One of the club’s social leaders had been the witness. While the story rocked the men’s locker room with laughter, it did not amuse the club ladies. A grievance committee was formed and a letter to the bishop drafted, relating the scandal.

At that point, fortunately, the doctor had a chance to interfere. The minister’s wife was down with pneumonia. She had caught a chill when, on that moonlight night, she had suddenly discovered before going to bed that her cocker spaniel was missing. Pokey had a habit of wandering into a neighbor’s property and worrying a big dog there. She had rushed out of the house in a white bathrobe. That had been the “Grecian gown.” Her frantic efforts to find Pokey, and then to trap him were the “dance” which the neighborhood had witnessed. The letter to the bishop, after the doctor was through with the ladies’ grievance committee was withdrawn. “But I hate to think,” he says, “what might have happened.”

The minister of a small New England farming community told me about a young physician, new in the township, who was called in the middle of the night to an outlying farm where an old lady lay dying after a heart attack. On the way the doctor drove off the road, smashed into a tree and was seriously injured. Before other medical help could be called, the woman was dead.

Gossip didn’t take long to start. The stretch of road on which the doctor had been driving was straight, the night had been clear. “Must have been drunk,” said somebody. Within a few hours that chance remark had become undisputed fact: The woman could have been saved, but the doctor had been drunk. The minister and the justice of the peace, among the few who refused to believe the gossip, investigated. They found that the doctor had been working without sleep for more than 24 hours. Sheer exhaustion had caused his accident. And no one, the county medical authorities agreed, could have saved the lady in any case. Although the doctor was cleared officially of any blame, it took two years for his practice to recover.

Almost all of us have been carriers, at one time or another, of such talks, often without thinking. It’s fun to gossip, and we are inclined to forget the dividing line between harmless and the malicious. We should give that dividing line a lot more thought. No psychologists are needed to establish it — just conscience.

Hannah More, the English writer, disliked gossip intensely. Whenever a visitor said something unpleasant about someone else or repeated a derogatory remark, Miss More had a disconcerting way of seizing the offender by the arm. “Come,” she would say, “we will go and ask whether this is true.” Nothing but a complete retraction would prevent the determined lady from dragging the slanderer to his or her victim. A more practical method for most of us was suggested a hundred years ago by an English Pastor. “When you hear an ill report about someone, halve and quarter it,” he said; “then say nothing about the rest.”

My comments

I don't know about you but I'm loving Hannah More's approach!

Any ideas for how people who are motivated by "hate, fear, envy, the desire to seem important, and sexual repression" could find happiness without taking it out on others?  Which of the previous essays do you think they should read?

cathryngoodman@yahoo.com

Comic relief

 I removed the joke that was next to this article in Keys to Happiness because it was an inappropriate juxtaposition with this essay. I'll stick it with another one.