Okay. I'm a gossip slut. I like to hear about your steamy anxieties and torrid affairs and the events that actually shape your world. I think there are many different types of gossips... Many like the journalistic reporting aspect of having news and pushing it through the grapevine. Some appreciate the shared social psychoanalysis of the people that you know. While I don't pretend that I am above such hobglobinish pleasures (and really, neither are you), my personal deal with trudging through sensitive information is that I just don't like being left in the dark.
Maybe it's something of a neurosis, but I don't like it when people hold information back from me. It's not even so much as a voyeuristic tendency, so much as a "you and I are having an interaction in the here and now, why are you not in the here and now with me?". But I digress...
One aspect of social interactions, inevitably is trust - not just the trust of one person, but the trust of many interconnected people. With the constant pull and tug of many daily emotional, financial, and physical transactions, I occasionally ponder just how much of the drama and disharmony that comes out of these transactions come from an imbalance of information. To a large extent, I think that power imbalances in personal relationships stem from blocks in communication and information transmission between the values that people carry and their relationship between these goals.
Inevitably, a person who is involved in multiple people's lives will play the part of a Trusted Third Party -- a person which 2 separate parties will confide their secrets in.
In the financial and political worlds, we are seeing a slow but nonethless important rise in the value of Trusted Third Party intermediaries. And example of the intermediary flow of information would come into play of smoothing out the transactions between a potential buyer and seller. Let's say Alice is in negotiations with Bob over the salary at which Bob will be hired.
Bob is willing to be hired on as low at $90k/year (but doesn't want Alice the hiring manager to know to know that), but wants to shoot for nominally significantly more than that. Alice is in an HR crunch and knows that Bob could walk away. She is willing hire Bob for as much as $150k (but doesn't want Bob to know that), and of course would prefer a much cheaper worker. Alice and Bob can turn to Trent, the Trust Third Party for some help with negotiations. Alice can tell Trent her range of salary reqs with an opening bid, and Bob does the same. If there is a match, then Trent proceeds to reveal the acceptable bids... However, if Alice low balls and Bob high balls, Trent simply returns with a "No Match Found", and the negotiation process can reiterate... with a much less stressful negotiation than if it were head to head.
Real life can get much more complicated: What happens when you become the intermediary of information in a big pile of gossip between feuding parties? What are the ethical routes of action in pursuing best interest? This is something of a repeating quandry in my life, and has occured relatively recently again. Here's a more grounded example:
Alice and Bob are having a public feud. They are having a personality clash and it's obvious that they don't like each other. You, however, are friends with both Alice and Bob and both of them trust you.
In a conversation with Alice, she tells you:
"I don't like Bob because he's so insensitive. The other day he was rude to when we were talking about topic x... He doesn't realize that I am very lonely and have social issues because of this Dark Secret I have. Ever since I was 12 I have had a medical disorder y due to drug use/eating disorder/etc. and it's very tough to me. But you can not tell ANYONE about my Dark Secret." (implied, of course, is that discussion of said Dark Secret with the feuding party Bob would be an overwhelming breach of trust.)
Sometime later, you are conversing with Bob, who you are also on very good terms with, and he tells you:
"Alice is such a bitch. The other day I brought up topic x and she freaked out. She doesn't realize that I'm just trying to deal with this Dark Secret I have. You see, I have social issues since I was 16 I have had a medical disorder y due to drug use/eating disorder/etc. and I feel very isolated because of it. But please do not tell anyone because my employment, family, etc. is on the line." Likewise, Bob does not like Alice very much at the moment.
While this is a seemingly contrived example, it actually stems from a real life interaction that I've had as an intermediary. Less clear cut, but similar feuds occur often when emotions run high and miscommunication is the norm.
From this we can think of a couple of scenarios that result from differing distribution of information equity. Currently, the lack of information on both parties side about the Dark Secret medical condition is causing strife for both of them. If both parties knew about each other's secret, you may be able to get a win-win scenario: both parties would not only understand why each other behaves the way they do, but they would also break the isolation. Getting to this point, however, would require the intermediary to break the rules of trust for both parties.
So what are the ethics of a gossip intermediary in these cases? I can see a range of possible actions for the Trusted Third Party:
1) Be conservative: Don't get involved. It's not your business, and focus on making your own life good. The fools who are involved in this drama can go hang themselves. I usually try to go for this solution... There are really 2 arguments going for this: