We spend a significant part of our lives chatting about other people. In other words, we all gossip. Although sometimes a contentious topic, various researchers have shown gossip to be fundamental to social life—from small groups to large, formal organizations. In this paper, we present the first study of gossip in a large CMC corpus. Adopting the Enron email dataset and natural language techni...

Gossip almost inevitably arises in real social networks. In this article we investigate the relationship between the number of friends of a person and limits on how far gossip about that person can spread in the network. How far gossip travels in a network depends on two sets of factors: a) factors determining gossip transmission from one person to the next and b) factors determining network to...

Although gossip serves several important social functions, it has relatively infrequently been the topic of systematic investigation. In two experiments, we advance a cognitive-informational approach to gossip. Specifically, we sought to determine which informational components engender gossip. In Experiment 1, participants read brief passages about other people and indicated their likelihood t...

We spend a significant part of our lives chatting about other people. In other words, we all gossip. Although sometimes a contentious topic, various researchers have shown gossip to be fundamental to social life—from small groups to large, formal organizations. Adopting the Enron email dataset and natural language techniques, we present the first study of gossip in a large CMC corpus. We find t...

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...

This thesis gives a formal logical analysis of a social phenomenon; gossip. Gossip can be used to serve many goals. The Sherlock Holmes’ of our society -always looking for an explanationmight use gossip to find an explanation for a surprising observation. Also for the agents that are not so eager to find the truth, for those who are more concerned about their social position instead, gossip mig...

A concept of systolic dissemination of information in interconnection networks is presented, and the complexity of systolic gossip and broadcast in one-way (telegraph) and two-way (telephone) communication mode is investigated. The following main results are established: (i) a general relation between systolic broadcast and systolic gossip, (ii) optimal systolic gossip algorithms on paths in bo...

Gossip protocols are a fast and effective strategy for computing a wide class of aggregate functions involving coordination of large sets of nodes. The monotonic nature of gossip protocols, however, mean that they can typically only adjust their estimate in one direction unless restarted, which disrupts the values being returned. We propose to improve the dynamical performance of gossip by runn...