Gossip and social exclusion in females: Do they have positive or negative consequences for social behaviour?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the past, studies of aggression focussed almost exclusively on physical aggression; findings revealed that males were more aggressive than females. Recently, interest in female aggression has been rekindled due to the suggestion by Crick and others that females aggress primarily by attacking personal relationships, (i.e., gossiping about others, excluding them from play groups, manipulating friendships); this form of aggression has been termed "relational aggression". Numerous studies have examined the relationship of relational aggression to negative outcomes such as peer rejection, loneliness and depression. However, relational aggression may fulfil a normative function in female social development by serving to create and maintain the intimate dyads that are the hallmark of girls' social interactions. In the present research, the relationship of gossip and exclusion to friendship intimacy and social competence was examined. Eighty-seven girls, 39 drawn from grades 4--5 and 48 drawn from grade 8 participated in the study. Engaging in negative gossip and exclusion were predictive of lower peer acceptance, which partially supported the hypothesis that these are dysfunctional behaviours. However, support for the positive role of these behaviours was obtained within the realm of friendship. Exclusion of peers from play was predictive of friendship intimacy in younger subjects, and interview data further supported the idea that these behaviours may help create and maintain intimate dyadic friendships: girls reported that gossip is most likely to occur in the presence of a best friend, and that the motivation behind exclusion is often preservation of a best friendship. Positive gossip, included with negative gossip in previous research, emerged as an important predictor of peer acceptance and friendship intimacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".