Gossip: Perspective Taking to Establish Cooperation

Abstract

Problems of cooperation are frequent among living organisms, but they are difficult to solve. Humans have been able to produce large-scale cooperation among unrelated individuals through reputation systems. A challenging puzzle, however, is how reputation can guide behaviour if in most cases it is not shared publicly and is assigned to others privately. We confirm that it is difficult to obtain cooperation among agents playing the Prisoner's Dilemma when reputations are individually assigned. We propose that third-party communication (gossip) can overcome this difficulty, but only under specific conditions concerning its content, amount and persistence. We show that -in order to sustain cooperation -gossip should not only be about private evaluations of others but should also include perspective taking and exchange of information about tolerance thresholds to support cooperation. This perspective taking reputational strategy can propagate and establish cooperation in the population independent of gossip frequency and population size, under various selection mechanisms of communication partners and targets, and assumptions concerning agents' memory.

Gossip is distinct from other topics in spontaneous conversation

“…This indicates that perspective-taking is an important characteristic of in-group gossip (cf. Davis, 1983;Beersma et al, 2018;Righi & Takács, 2022).…”

Clustering drives cooperation on reputation networks, all else fixed

“…It would be interesting to ask if the optimal reputation assessment technique is dependent on the clustering coefficient, and thus likely to shift with demographic processes. In particular, models of perspective taking, and sharing information about reputation thresholds [ 74 ] combined with the structural dynamics in the Microfoundations Theory could shed a new light on why public information about reputation may be likely to foster cooperation, especially in post-demographic transition societies.…”

What Matters Most in Supporting Cooperation, the Gossip Content or the Gossiper’s Intention? Simulating Motive Interpretation in Gossip Dynamics

“…Moreover to sustain cooperation, gossip should contain multiple pieces of information, making the message more complex and time consuming. That is, gossip should not only convey private assessments of others, but must also include elements of perspective taking and information about tolerance thresholds (Righi & Takács 2022).…”

“…1.3 Thus, computational models portray a many-sided picture on how gossip impacts cooperation. While certain models praise gossip as a powerful mechanism to sustain high levels of cooperation (Meng et al 2018;Smith 2014), other models show how its positive role is contingent on the applications of restrictive conditions (Giardini & Vilone 2016; Righi & Takács 2022;Testori et al 2022), questioning whether gossip can indeed be considered as an efficient and effective mechanism to promote cooperation. Being a complex human behaviour, we should not consider gossip as a completely beneficial or harmful action, especially as its consequences for someone's reputation can be difficult to predict or even to assess in the short run.…”