Running Head: Gossiping as moral action Gossiping as Moral Social Action: A Functionalist Account of Gossiper Perceptions

It appears that there are two universal dimensions of social cognition, capturing a person’s intention to be good or to do good things (i.e., morality) and his or her capacity to carry out his or her intentions (i.e., competence, or Heider’s “can”). Perceivers are strongly biased towards the former dimension, as they are more likely to seek out and act upon information concerning a person’s morality than his or her competence. It has been suggested that this bias is an adaptive response to the fact that an individual’s morality (but not competence) has implications for the wellbeing of others. If morality information is particularly important for success in the social world, then the human propensity for sharing information about each other’s actions and attributes (i.e., gossiping) should be highly functional when this gossip concerns a target’s morality. Indeed, as the result of its ability to affect the wellbeing of the audience, gossiping should itself be perceived as an intrinsically moral action, and gossipers who share information that benefits the audience (i.e., diagnostic morality information) should be perceived to be particularly moral. We tested this functionalist account of gossiping in three experiments and as expected found that gossipers who shared diagnostic information about the morality of a target were judged to be more moral themselves. At the group level, this meant that single items of gossip affected perceptions of ingroup morality and participants’ attachment to the ingroup both directly (by affecting target perceptions) and indirectly (by affecting gossiper perceptions). This suggests that gossip has a richer ability to regulate group life than has hitherto been anticipated.