Despite its bad reputation, gossip plays an important role in communicating and policing the social norms, morals, and values of a community. People are likely to be particularly attuned to gossip that helps solve recurrent adaptive challenges. Among women, sexual assault is a pervasive threat to reproductive choice that exacts serious costs on women’s reproductive fitness. Research has demonstrated that women fear sexual assault and are motivated to engage in behaviors to reduce the threat of being victimized. Here we propose that women may gossip about sexual assault as a means of protecting themselves and others. Participants read a series of vignettes describing instances of sexual assault of a female victim and were asked to indicate how likely they would be to share that information with a variety of recipients, and what factors motivated their sharing intentions. Results indicated that, overall, sexual assault gossip was especially likely to be shared with proximal female family and friends, as well as authority figures. Women were more likely to share sexual assault gossip than men, and this gender effect was strongest when sharing gossip with female family and friends. The strongest motivations for sharing gossip were to warn the recipient, damage the reputation of the perpetrator, and check agreement with the recipient, with women being more motivated to damage the perpetrator’s reputation than men were. Women who expressed a greater fear of rape were more likely to share the information with all recipients except proximal male friends, and reported stronger motivations to share in order to damage the perpetrator’s reputation and check agreement with the recipient. Results are consistent with the idea that women may use gossip to create a whisper-network of information exchange that helps women protect themselves and others.

尽管八卦名声不佳，但它在传达和监管社区的社会规范、道德和价值观方面发挥着重要作用。人们可能特别喜欢有助于解决反复出现的适应性挑战的八卦。在女性中，性侵犯是对生育选择的普遍威胁，对女性的生殖健康造成了严重代价。研究表明，女性害怕性侵犯，并有动力从事一些行为以减少成为受害者的威胁。在这里，我们建议女性可以八卦性侵犯，以此作为保护自己和他人的一种手段。参与者阅读了一系列描述女性受害者性侵犯事件的小插曲，并被要求说明他们与各种接收者分享这些信息的可能性有多大，以及哪些因素激发了他们的分享意图。结果表明，总体而言，性侵犯八卦特别有可能与近亲女性家人和朋友以及权威人物分享。女性比男性更有可能分享性侵犯八卦，而这种性别效应在与女性家人和朋友分享八卦时最强。分享八卦的最强烈动机是警告接受者，损害肇事者的声誉，并检查与接受者的协议，女性比男性更有动力损害肇事者的声誉。对强奸表现出更大恐惧的女性更有可能与除近亲男性朋友以外的所有接收者分享信息，并报告说有更强烈的分享动机，以损害肇事者的声誉并检查与接收者的协议。 结果与女性可能利用八卦来创建一个信息交换的耳语网络，帮助女性保护自己和他人的想法是一致的。