Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

Reputation lives in gossip. It’s in the delicious little tales we tell each other that our reputations – these radically simplified avatars that represent us in the social world – are given life. Our appearance as characters in moral stories means we’re automatically cast as heroes or villains, our flaws or attributes magnified, depending on our role in the plot. And we can’t help but gossip. Studies that measure how much of human conversation it constitutes put the figure at between 65 and 90 per cent. At the age of three, children start communicating their ideas of who can and can’t be trusted to those around them. Despite the gendered stereotype, men are no less gossipy than women – they just tend to do it less when women are around to hear them.