I’ll list some benefits of gossiping about people who appear to have gone crazy. “Knowing to beware of those people” was mentioned, but here are others:
If you know what they had been doing prior to going crazy, which seems potentially causally related (e.g. taking certain drugs, being already in a mentally vulnerable state for other reasons, hanging out with certain crazy-ish people, and/or obsessing about certain books or blogs), then you can update your beliefs about what’s dangerous to do. Which can inform your own behavior and possibly that of your friends.
If you know how that person behaves currently or in the past, you can update your model of how to estimate a given person’s current or future sanity based on their behavior.
I’ll note it seems common for people, when they hear that someone died, to want to know how they died, especially if they died young. This seems obviously evolutionarily useful—learning about the dangers in your environment—and it seems plausibly an evolved desire. You can replace “went crazy” with “died” above (or with any significantly negative outcome), and most of it applies directly.
I’ll list some benefits of gossiping about people who appear to have gone crazy. “Knowing to beware of those people” was mentioned, but here are others:
If you know what they had been doing prior to going crazy, which seems potentially causally related (e.g. taking certain drugs, being already in a mentally vulnerable state for other reasons, hanging out with certain crazy-ish people, and/or obsessing about certain books or blogs), then you can update your beliefs about what’s dangerous to do. Which can inform your own behavior and possibly that of your friends.
If you know how that person behaves currently or in the past, you can update your model of how to estimate a given person’s current or future sanity based on their behavior.
I’ll note it seems common for people, when they hear that someone died, to want to know how they died, especially if they died young. This seems obviously evolutionarily useful—learning about the dangers in your environment—and it seems plausibly an evolved desire. You can replace “went crazy” with “died” above (or with any significantly negative outcome), and most of it applies directly.