Some people see gossip as a nasty vice that should be curbed. Not us! Not Scientific American, either—they've explained why we're "hardwired to be fascinated by gossip." After the jump: science explains why we're all snark, all the time, and hate on everything.For example: do you buy the latest US Weekly if there's a dude on the cover? Practically no one does. Why? 'Cause women want to read and gossip about other women. The relentless coverage of the Britneys of the world isn't as unfair and sexist as it seems—it's what you want.

"In keeping with the evolutionary hypotheses suggested earlier, we have consistently found that people are most interested in gossip about individuals of the same sex as themselves who happen to be around their own age."

That's why Sarah Palin sells: "although males are usually more interested in news about other males, females are virtually obsessed with news about other females."

We have also found that information that is socially useful is always of greatest interest to us: we like to know about the scandals and misfortunes of our rivals and of high-status people because this information might be valuable in social competition. Positive information about such people tends to be uninteresting to us. Finding out that someone already higher in status than ourselves has just acquired something that puts that person even further ahead of us does not supply us with ammunition that we can use to gain ground on him.

Like Rupert Murdoch. The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves [Scientific American via Boing Boing]