Tại sao tin tức lá cải luôn đông khách?

Tôi đã từng viết thế nàyмебели софия

Hôm kia xem CNN thấy bàn chuyện Paris Hilton đi Rwanda và cô ấy cảm thấy rất buồn, tí nữa thì nôn ọe với bọn CNN xôi thịt rẻ tiền này.

Dĩ nhiên, câu hỏi quan trọng hơn là tại sao CNN và các kênh truyền thông đại chúng khác lại kiếm tiền được — và trong một số trường hợp, kiếm tiền chính — bằng đăng tin lá cải, gossip, đời tư nghệ sĩ này nọ. Tại sao có nhiều người quan tâm đến những thứ vô vị này?

Rộng hơn nữa, tại sao người ta gossip — về Britney, Angie qua báo, về anh bạn hàng xóm, và chị bạn cấp 2 truyền miệng, cùng với cả tá cách gossip qua các phương tiện truyền “thông” khác? Trích một bài mới ở Scientific American có câu trả lời:

In keeping with the evolutionary hypotheses suggested earlier, we have consistently found that people are most interested in gossip about individuals of the same sex as themselves who happen to be around their own age. We have also found that information that is socially useful is always of greatest interest to us: we like to know about the scandals and misfortunes of our rivals and of high-status people because this information might be valuable in social competition. Positive information about such people tends to be uninteresting to us. Finding out that someone already higher in status than ourselves has just acquired something that puts that person even further ahead of us does not supply us with ammunition that we can use to gain ground on him. Conversely, positive information about our friends and relatives is very interesting and likely to be used to our advantage whenever possible. For example, in studies that my colleagues and I published in 2002 and in 2007 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, we consistently found that college students were not much interested in hearing about academic awards or a large inheritance if it involved one of their professors and that they were also not very interested in passing that news along to others. Yet the same information about their friends or romantic partners was rated as being quite interesting and likely to be spread around.
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Thus, gossip is a more complicated and socially important phenomenon than we think. When gossip is discussed seriously, the goal usually is to suppress the frequency with which it occurs in an attempt to avoid the undeniably harmful effects it often has in work groups and other social networks. This tendency, however, overlooks that gossip is part of who we are and an essential part of what makes groups function as well as they do. Perhaps it may become more productive to think of gossip as a social skill rather than as a character flaw, because it is only when we do not do it well that we get into trouble. Adopting the role of the self-righteous soul who refuses to participate in gossip at work or in other areas of your social life ultimately will be self-defeating. It will turn out to be nothing more than a ticket to social isolation. On the other hand, becoming that person who indiscriminately blabs everything you hear to anyone who will listen will quickly get you a reputation as an untrustworthy busybody. Successful gossiping is about being a good team player and sharing key information with others in a way that will not be perceived as self-serving and about understanding when to keep your mouth shut.