I never understood how dangerous gossip is until I studied psychology where I discovered that a word or two that we say can result in destroying the relationship of many people months later!!
Your mind doesn’t see, hear or read but it tries to match what it receives from the external world with what it has in the internal world and That’s why you mihgt not notcie the erros that are in this phrsae you are currenlty raeding.
Even if you noticed these errors your mind will quickly try to find a match for them in its internal database so that it allows you to get the correct meanings.
The same goes for hearing. Have you ever heard a phrase that you didn’t recognize then few seconds later you got what the other person was trying to say? Its the same thing exactly, your mind tried to find the closest match for the phrase and that’s why you understood it seconds later.
So what does this has to do with gossiping!!!
If a guy never met “Sam” and you told him that “Sam” is a mean person then his mind will store in its database the fact that Sam is mean even if he was not sure of it.
As soon as your friends meets Sam his mind will try to match Sam’s behavior with its internal database which states that Sam is mean and so the result will be interpreting any mistake that Sam makes as a sign for being mean.
Moreover, if Sam did anything good your friend’s mind will discard it because it doesn’t match its own database. Unless Sam does a considerable amount of effort to prove otherwise your friend will find hundreds of clues that supports the fact that he is mean.
Your friend will then start to treat Sam in a bad way after discovering that he is mean which will force Sam to respond back with bad treatment too.
Shortly those two people will become enemies and they will start to hate each other. And guess what, all of this happened because of the small seed you planted when you told your friend that Sam is a mean person!!
Now what if you told him that Sam is mean, selfish, worthless and not interesting?
Our minds get programmed by repetition. Even if your friend was on good terms with Sam, still repeating the fact that he is mean will result in programming your friend’s mind to believe that Sam is really mean.
The effect of the programming will become 10 times more powerful if two people did the same thing, for example if you and a third friend told your other friend that Sam is mean then most probably he will believe you.
In short, our minds always tries to match the external world with its internal world. By gossiping about someone you are modifying the listener’s internal world in such a way that he might find these bad things in the person you are talking about even if they were not there.
The only advice I have for you is to never gossip about someone, please try.
Peoplesmind
