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If you’ve ever walked around this large city talking about your private affairs, there’s a big chance someone got curious enough to stop and listen. But where does this urge of peeking into other people’s lives come from? Well, it seems that observing others is not only compelling and entertaining, but also primal.

John Locke, a professor of language science and author of Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, spoke to Quartz about how this habit of listening to others was first characterized, and how we can actually benefit from our nosiness. He gave a compelling argument defending this human behavior and started with mentioning that it evolved over time.

“Monkeys generally are very watchful and not just by eye, but by ear,” the professor explained. “We can assume that the very earliest humans, or proto-humans, were like that as well. … We have regions in the brain, mechanisms in the brain that are designed to draw inferences from partial information that we see and hear and smell.” Being extremely aware of what’s going on helped humans stay vigilant and protect the things they possess.

It’s interesting that when someone is talking quietly, it grabs people’s attention. However, when they are being loud, others start to feel annoyed and wish they could cover their ears. The reason behind it is that noisy social behavior violates one basic law of nature: “We don’t like donations. We don’t like it when people present us with information about themselves that we’re not seeking.”

“[People] want to know what you’re truly like inside, not what others want them to think,” Locke said. “We love it when we get something that’s truly genuinely true about others and so we still prefer taking it, or if not taking it, extracting clues on our own.”

There certainly are some psychological effects eavesdropping has on humans, because every single one of us has surrendered to our nosiness at one point or another. “It’s pretty clear that one of the things that stands as a threat to us, even in modern society, is the presence of a stranger. We simply don’t know what they’re like or what their intentions might be.”

It’s hard to tell what a person truly is like just from their appearance. Still, our eyes, ears and nose help us in sniffing out if they're a friend, or a foe. It’s only natural that we would have some kind of instrument in our brain that would help us in determining if the stranger poses us any danger.

“We’re quite good at reading those displays, or those sensitive cues, that people give off. There are mechanisms in the brain that are specialized for that purpose,” the professor explained.

According to Locke, there are no real negative consequences of eavesdropping. When we’re out in public, we need to know how to behave, so naturally, we turn to other people. We look around, see how they are dressed, how they talk, and observe their behavior in general, “and there’s nothing eavesdrop-y about that”.

We are also very intrigued by how other people behave in private. We spend most of our lives alone with our thoughts, and it’s interesting to see how others act when they think no one is observing them. “The only way you can know that is by looking at other people who think that they’re alone,” John Locke mentioned. 

In a previous interview, Dr. Lauren Emberson, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, told Bored Panda that we find such private interactions entertaining simply because we don’t know the whole story. 

“These convos were very irritating at a time before texting when everyone was talking on their cell phones and it was very noisy with those conversations in public spaces like buses,” she explained. “Now most people text (myself included) so they might be more of a curiosity than anything else. My personal opinion is that they are funny because they are out of context and that engages your curiosity in a way.” 

One really important benefit of listening to others’ conversations—it’s simply hilarious. Who would want to keep such chit-chats secret when they result in so many genuine laughs? So dear Chicagoans, keep your ears open and make sure to submit the most bizarre things you overhear on those windy streets to Overheard in Chicago.