Gossip and reputation in everyday life

Abstract

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’.

Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences

“…These findings are corroborated by studies on punishment in daily life settings, showing that anger predicts both direct and indirect punishment responses, whereas disgust is specifically associated with gossip and ostracism [51]. One potential explanation for why disgust motivates gossip against offenders is that sharing information about norm violations can effectively recruit subsequent ostracism from the receivers against the targets of gossip [82,87].…”

“…Consistent with these ideas, people who feel less powerful are more likely to respond to norm violations by gossiping or avoiding the offenders, rather than by directly confronting them [51]. Gossiping about transgressors also allows individuals who are less powerful to recruit punishment from third parties [40,82,87], potentially reducing individual costs of punishment and the risk of retaliation from powerful others.…”

“…First, gossip plays a key role in facilitating cheater detection and partner choice. Indeed, people share and use reputational information to selectively cooperate with partners who have positive reputations [77][78][79][80][81] and avoid partners who have negative reputations [17,81,82]. Further, although gossip itself may be less effective at changing targets' behaviours, the mere threat of being gossiped about by others motivates people to strive to build and maintain good reputations [16,[18][19][20].…”

“…any potential perpetrators) [72,86]. Gossip can help achieve general deterrence by allowing people to coordinate with third parties and recruit punishment from them [82,87], lowering the otherwise high costs of uncoordinated direct punishment (see also [88][89][90]). Finally, gossip may represent one way for individuals to take revenge by imposing strong symbolic costs on an offender, while reinstating their own image in the eyes of their community [54,74].…”

The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling

“…Another important question is whether the everyday use of gossip is consistent with the leading theories of reputation and cooperation. Dores et al [62] test several predictions from theories of IR and reputation-based partner selection about the content of everyday gossip. Using experience sampling methods, the researchers asked a Dutch community sample to report on recent gossip events they experienced in order to acquire information about the content and the consequences of gossip in everyday life.…”