Workplace gossip is a ubiquitous phenomenon around the world: research on organizations in both the United States and Western Europe suggests that over 90% of the workforce engages in at least some gossip activity on the job (Gosser et al., 2012). Organizational literature has paid little attention to gossip and, perhaps because of its complexity, management research surrounding gossip is scant...

Gossip is informal talking about colleagues. Taking a social network perspective, we argue that group boundaries and social status in the informal workplace network determine who the objects of positive and negative gossip are. Gossip networks were collected among 36 employees in a public child care organization, and analyzed using exponential random graph modeling (ERGM). As hypothesized, both...

The idea of a “memetic” spread of solutions through a human culture in parallel to their development is applied as a distributed approach to learning. Local parts of a problem are associated with a set of overlapping localities in a space and solutions are then evolved in those localities. Good solutions are not only crossed with others to search for better solutions but also they propagate acr...

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...