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It transpires men like a good gossip just as much as women, according to new research from Leicester University. But women are the more gossiped about sex, writes Anthea Lipsett.
Postgraduate researcher Charlotte De Backer looked at the differences between the sexes and what they gossip about and found that men are interested in talking about potential mates.
And while gossip about women by both sexes tends to focus on someone's looks, gossip about men is mostly to do with their wealth and status.
Everyone, however, uses gossip to find out about potential mates or rivals, with people already in relationships just as keen on finding this out as single people.
De Backer is now looking at the impact of celebrity gossip on society. She says celebrity gossip is becoming the new social cement of our societies. "We might not have mutual acquaintances to gossip about, but we all 'know' Paris, Britney, Madonna and the Beckhams to gossip about," she says.
If after a good gossip you want to find out if what you've heard is true, however, researchers at Portsmouth University may have the answer: try getting the person spreading it to tell the story backwards.
According to social psychology professor Aldert Vrij, asking suspects to tell their alibis from back to front makes it easier for police to spot a liar than reading their body language in interviews.
Police tend to use physical signs, such as shifting uncomfortably, stumbling over words or avoiding eye contact to gauge whether a suspect is telling the truth. But putting them under more mental stress would be more effective.
When researchers raised the "cognitive load" on interviewees by asking them to tell their stories in reverse order "suspects" gave away more non-verbal clues as to whether they were lying or not and, tellingly, the police officers who watched the interviews were better able to discriminate between truthful and false accounts.
What would Gene Hunt, the bruising detective star of Life on Mars, make of that?
