We've all been there. You tell your friend a secret and then suddenly everyone knows your

business. Or maybe a friend told you something that's a secret and well, it's not like the

person you shared it with is even in the same city. I don't know. I've never done that

in square. I'm like the best secret keeper ever. Everyone knows not about me or or maybe

a text about you comes to your phone by accident, Nightmare, gossip. It's in schools, offices,

extended families. Everyone wants to talk about it. So welcome to the show, Dr. Melton Ugel,

who is a postdoctoral associate at Duke University's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

She researches the development of social cognition and morality, specifically focusing on how and

when children become moral beings. She also founded an amazing website, psychresearchlist.com,

where people can find incredible resources about psychology, which we're going to get more into

that later. But Melton, how are you? Hi, I'm so great. Thank you so much for having me.

You know, I have to tell you, did you hear that woman that runs this podcast behind the scenes,

Erica? She's a total nightmare. She is just a total nightmare. I'm, Erica, I was so kidding. I just

had to go there for the gossip of it all. Actually, I heard the opposite. She's the most amazing person

of all time. No, I literally like would never, there would be no getting curious if it wasn't without

Erica. We love her so much. But I just like dovings. I was like, Erica, are you still listening,

but she always is. She's like the most amazing. We can't help it. Okay, but wait. So this all came from

like 730 in the morning, one morning, which is typically when I have my best ideas. And I think I

called Erica, who's our amazing executive producer, getting curious. We love so much. And I was like,

I need to know like the psychology of why we talked shit about each other. Sometimes it's not even

like malicious. Like I just want to know, like I just want to know everything. So we all know what

gossip is, but how do you define it in your work? Yeah. So there is a lot of definitions of gossip

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