If you happen to be the kind of person who worries that other people are talking about you, you could well be right, because you worry about them talking about you. Slate summarizes a study by Jennifer Mason Carr:
Another study about how your private insecurities are to blame for troubled work relationships and probably everything else that’s going wrong in your life. Researchers from the London Business School have determined that self-conscious, paranoid people are more likely to be gossiped about behind their backs, because they’re so insanely self-conscious and paranoid.