I Heard It from Someone Who Heard It from Someone: The Case for Thirdhand Experience

When Gossip Knocks on the Door

“Did you hear what Cousin Belinda said to Aunt Sally?” my mom asked in the middle of another story already in progress. For a split second, I thought I had lost the thread. Was this part of the same story or a detour? Then I realized she was about to tiptoe into gossip, the kind of thing where, charming as it might be, I probably would not know the people involved well enough to care deeply. It is not that I dislike hearing about others’ antics; it’s just that without knowing the cast of characters, it’s hard to see how the plot fits into the bigger picture.

Still, gossip has a funny way of pulling us in, even when we start out skeptical. We lean in, we pick up details, we try to piece together motives and backstories. And in doing so, we’re participating in something that’s as old as language itself.

Gossip as a Cognitive Tool

When you step back, gossip (that no-good, integrity-lacking pastime in polite society) turns into something more complicated: a mode of human communication. Kieran Egan, in his work on imaginative education, describes gossip as one of the primary “cognitive tools” of mythic understanding, the form of understanding that flourishes once children gain oral language.

In that light, “the gift of the gab,” as my mother would say of her own mother (“She could talk to anyone!”), is not idle chatter but a core way of making sense of the world through stories. Gossip doesn’t just spread information but frames it, interprets it, and makes it meaningful within a social web.

Defining Thirdhand Experience

And this is where thirdhand experience comes in.

Thirdhand experience is hearing about someone else’s experience (Person B) through an intermediary (Person A). In the Belinda-Aunt Sally scenario, I’m hearing the story from my mom, who heard it from Aunt Sally, who heard it from Belinda. I have no direct experience of what happened; my mom doesn’t either. Each retelling adds a layer of interpretation, emphasis, and omission. Think: the party game “telephone,” only with higher stakes and real-world consequences.

These layers are not just distortions; they are transformations. They can sharpen a message, dull it, or recast it entirely. And this process, which is so natural in everyday conversation, is also embedded in how we share and preserve knowledge on a much larger scale.

From Gossip to Textbooks

Gossip might seem trivial, but it is actually a close cousin to how we share knowledge more broadly. Take the humble school textbook. What most people think of as “the curriculum” is really a carefully packaged synthesis: historians and scientists comb through primary sources (firsthand), scholars summarize those accounts (secondhand), and then textbook authors translate them into age-appropriate form (thirdhand).

In each step, decisions are made: which details to include, which to leave out, how to arrange the story so it’s clear, coherent, and fits the intended audience. Just as gossip reshapes a story at each handoff, textbooks filter knowledge through layers of voices, priorities, and contexts. A history textbook about the American Revolution will not be identical to one published in a different country; each version reflects the handoffs it has passed through.

Science: The Queen of Thirdhand Experience

Now, let’s stretch the gossip analogy into the world of science. A researcher conducts an experiment, analyzes the data, and writes a paper which is already secondhand for the reader, because it’s been shaped into a formal account. That paper might be read and cited by another researcher, who draws connections between several studies to develop a broader theory. And then another group might take dozens or hundreds of these papers, review them systematically, and produce a meta-analysis.

That meta-analysis is the scientific equivalent of “I heard from someone who heard from someone…” Not because it is unreliable, but because it deliberately layers and abstracts the information to capture patterns no single firsthand account could reveal. In fact, this kind of thirdhand experience is where many of the most powerful insights in science emerge. We rarely change global health policy or rewrite physics textbooks based on a single experiment; instead, we act on the weight of collective evidence, sifted and synthesized over time.

Think about climate science: no one person has directly observed “global warming” in its entirety. Instead, scientists combine data from thousands of weather stations, satellite records, ice cores, and ocean buoys (put differently, decades of disparate firsthand accounts) into the collective understanding we now have.

The Distance Problem

This layering also explains why thirdhand experience can feel so far from our own lives. In education, we start students with firsthand writing: “I went to the zoo” and “This is my house.” Over time, we ask them to shift into third-person, evidence-based writing: layers away from “I saw it myself.” Many find the shift hard to make because each step moves us further from the visceral immediacy of lived experience.

And yet, stepping away from the self is often necessary. It allows us to see beyond our own limited view, to place our experience in conversation with others’, and to draw conclusions that have broader significance.

A Different Kind of Power

Thirdhand experience is not a pale imitation of “real” experience. It is a different kind of power. Without it, we would not have modern medicine, global communication, or our current understanding of the universe. Like gossip, it is a way we humans knit together the stories we cannot all witness firsthand.

Recognizing this does not mean we abandon firsthand encounters or stop valuing lived experience. Instead, it invites us to notice the relationships between the different modes of knowing. Each has its strengths, its blind spots, and its place in how we understand the world.

If gossip is the informal network that keeps a family, a neighborhood, or a community connected, then science and education are the structured, scaled-up versions of that same process; designed to share, interpret, and build upon what no single person can see alone.