Gossip—a sender communicating to a receiver about an absent third party—is hypothesized to impact reputation formation, partner selection, and cooperation. Lab experiments have found that people gossip about others’ cooperativeness and that they use gossip to condition their cooperation. Here, we move beyond the lab and test several predictions from theories of indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner selection about the content of gossip in daily life and how people use it to update the reputation of others in their social network. In a Dutch community sample (N = 309), we sampled daily events in which people either sent or received gossip about a target over 10 days (k = 5,154). Gossip senders frequently shared information about a target’s cooperativeness and did so in ways that minimize potential retaliation from targets. Receivers overwhelmingly believed gossip to be true and updated their evaluation of targets based on gossip. In turn, a positive shift in a target’s evaluation led to higher intentions to help them in future interactions, along with lower intentions to avoid them in the future. Thus, gossip is used in daily life to efficiently impact and update reputations in a way that enables partner selection and indirect reciprocity.

Gossip—a sender communicating to a receiver about an absent third party—is hypothesized to impact reputation formation, partner selection, and cooperation. Laboratory experiments have found that people gossip about others' cooperativeness and that they use gossip to condition their cooperation. Here, we move beyond the laboratory and test several predictions from theories of indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner selection about the content of everyday gossip and how people use it to update the reputation of others in their social network. In a Dutch community sample ( N = 309), we sampled daily events in which people either sent or received gossip about a target over 10 days ( n gossip = 5284). Gossip senders frequently shared information about targets’ cooperativeness and did so in ways that minimize potential retaliation from targets. Receivers overwhelmingly believed gossip to be true and updated their evaluation of targets based on gossip. In turn, a positive shift in the evaluation of a target was associated with higher intentions to help them in future interactions, and with lower intentions to avoid them in the future. Thus, gossip is used in daily life to impact and update reputations in a way that enables partner selection and indirect reciprocity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

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Recent work suggests that implicit partner evaluations have long-term implications for relationship success. However, little evidence shows whether and under which conditions implicit partner evaluations affect relationship maintenance processes in daily life, especially those exhibited in situations that may be highly decisive for the fate of the relationship, such as when partners hurt each other. Drawing upon dual-process theories, we predicted that, when executive control is limited—either as a trait or a state—people’s implicit partner evaluations influence forgiveness toward their partner. Results revealed that when temporarily impairing people’s executive control with an experimental manipulation (Study 1), or for people with lower trait executive control (Study 2), more positive implicit partner evaluations were associated with more forgiveness, both in laboratory settings and in an 8-day diary. These findings highlight the importance of implicit partner evaluations under specific, yet common, conditions for promoting reparatory responses that are key to relationship success.

The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a popular closed-vocabulary text analysis software program that is used to understand whether individuals' use of linguistic categories (i.e., word categories, such as negative affect) depends on their personality traits. Here, we present the first meta-analysis of the relations between the Big Five personality traits and 52 linguistic categories of the English language. Across 31 eligible samples (n = 85,724), the results showed that (a) self-reported personality traits are significantly correlated with linguistic categories, but the effect sizes are relatively small (the strongest effect sizes between the Big Five and linguistic categories ranged from |ρ| = .08 to .14, and the 52 LIWC categories explained on average 5.1% of personality variance); (b) observerreported personality traits are significantly correlated with linguistic categories, with the effect sizes being small-to-medium (|ρ| = .18-.39, explaining 38.5% of personality variance); (c) 20 linguistic categories (out of 260; 5 Personality Traits × 52 LIWC Categories) correlated both with self-and observer-reported personality traits (the "kernel of truth" in linguistic markers of personality); and (d) 10 study, sample, and task characteristics significantly moderated the correlations of the linguistic categories with personality traits, showing that the effect sizes were mainly stronger for longer texts and older LIWC versions, among others. Public Significance StatementThis meta-analysis identifies the linguistic categories (i.e., word categories, such as negative affect) that individuals use depending on their personality traits, as well as the linguistic categories that other people use to draw personality inferences. Individuals indeed use specific linguistic categories depending on their personality traits and others use specific linguistic categories to draw personality inferences, but those relations are dependent on study and tasks characteristics (e.g., text length, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count version).