The virtues of gossip: reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial Behavior

Altruism and Indirect Reciprocity: The Interaction of Person and Situation in Prosocial Behavior

A persistent puzzle in the social and biological sciences is the existence of prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others, often at a cost to oneself. Recent theoretical models and empirical studies of indirect reciprocity show that actors behave prosocially in order to develop an altruistic reputation and receive future benefits from third parties. Accordingly, individuals should stop inve...

Gossip as an effective and low-cost form of punishment.

The spreading of reputational information about group members through gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment. Research shows that negative arousal states motivate individuals to gossip about the transgressions of group members. By sharing information in this way groups are better able to promote cooperation and maintain social control and order.

Gossip and ostracism promote cooperation in groups.

The widespread existence of cooperation is difficult to explain because individuals face strong incentives to exploit the cooperative tendencies of others. In the research reported here, we examined how the spread of reputational information through gossip promotes cooperation in mixed-motive settings. Results showed that individuals readily communicated reputational information about others, a...

Malicious mouths? The Dark Triad and motivations for gossip

There are several reasons for why people may be motivated to engage in gossip, such as group protection, status enhancement, and social bonding. In an on-line study (N = 372), we investigated how individual differences affect gossiping behaviour by examining the relationship between the Dark Triad (i.e., primary and secondary psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism) and motivations to goss...