Gossip: Perspective Taking to Establish Cooperation

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