Antecedents and Consequences of Gossip in Work Groups

This chapter provides an overview of the antecedents and consequences of gossip in work groups. First, the chapter reviews the different motives for gossip in work groups (i.e., bonding, entertainment, emotional venting, information exchange, maintenance of group norms/social order, and interpersonal aggression) and links each motive to psychological theory. Second, the chapter reviews the different types of influence that gossip can have on various indicators of group effectiveness. Reflecting on the motives underlying gossip in work groups, as well as on its outcomes, it argues that future research should start integrating the diverse insights provided by earlier research on both gossip motives and outcomes, and it provides a number of suggestions for doing so.

Reputation and Gossip in Game Theory

When interacting with others, it is often important for you to know what they have done in similar situations in the past: to know their reputation. One reason is that their past behavior may be a guide to their future behavior. A second reason is that their past behavior may have qualified them for reward and cooperation, or for punishment and revenge. The fact that you respond positively or negatively to the reputation of others then generates incentives for them to maintain good reputations. This article surveys the game theory literature which analyses the mechanisms and incentives involved in reputation. It also discusses how experiments have shed light on strategic behavior involved in maintaining reputations, and the adequacy of unreliable and third party information (gossip) for maintaining incentives for cooperation.

Gossip as a Social Skill

Gossip is a more complicated and socially important phenomenon than most people think, and campaigns to stamp out gossip in workplaces and other social settings overlook the fact that gossip is part of human nature and an essential part of what makes social groups function as well as they do. This chapter takes the position that gossip is an evolutionary adaptation and that it is the primary tool for monitoring and managing the reputation of individuals in society. An interest in the affairs of other people is a necessary component of being a socially competent person, and the chapter explores the multi-dimensional nature of gossip-related social skills. It pays special attention to “gossip as a social skill,” rather than as a character flaw, and presents insights into related phenomena such as how people use social media such as Facebook.

Gossip and Reputation in Adolescent Networks

Adolescence is an important age of development when collective norms emerge, social exclusion often takes place, and competition for reputation is relatively intense. Negative gossip is used with increasing intentionality to interfere in these processes. At the same time, being the object of negative gossip undermines chances to obtain good reputation. This chapter reviews the role of gossiping in the formation of informal status relations of adolescents. It provides an overview of theoretical explanations and empirical findings on how reputation and gossip are related with a special focus on the school context. It presents recent methodological advancements of social network methods used for analyzing the complex interrelated dynamics of gossip, reputation, and peer relations among adolescents. As an illustration, the chapter shows that malicious gossip leads to disdain while disdain induces malicious gossip in a longitudinal analysis of Hungarian secondary school classes. Finally, it discusses the theoretical and practical implications of our illustrative analysis and formulate suggestions for future research.

Human Sociality and Psychological Foundations

The argument developed in this chapter is that gossip and reputation constitute elements of social intelligence; they are intrinsically linked social psychological processes adapted to human needs to sustain and successfully navigate the complex social worlds humans inhabit. First, gossiping serves an informal social control function, sensitizing social actors to the reputational costs of bad behavior. Second, however, attention to gossip, and skilled appraisal of the information it provides, feeds into reputational judgments of personality and character, allowing these judgments to serve as more reliable predictions about others. These claims are tested against available research evidence, while gaps in the evidential framework are identified as foci for future work.

Gossip and Reputation in Social Dilemmas

In a social dilemma the interest of the individual is in conflict with that of the group. However, individuals will help their group, if they gain in reputation that pays off later. Future partners can observe cooperative or defective behavior or, more likely, hear about it through gossip. In Indirect Reciprocity games, Public Goods games, and Trust games gossip may be the only information a participant can use to decide whether she can trust her interaction partner and give away her holdings hoping for reciprocation. Even the mere potential for gossip can increase trust and trustworthiness thus promoting cooperation. Gossip is a cheap mechanism for disciplining free riders, potentially even extortioners. The temptation for manipulative gossip defines the gossiper’s dilemma. Psychological adaptations for assessing gossip veracity help to avoid being manipulated. The danger of false gossip is reduced when multiple gossips exist.

Gossip and Reputation in Childhood

Analysis of the development of gossip and reputation during childhood can help with understanding these processes in adulthood, as well as with understanding children’s own social worlds. Five stages of gossip-related behavior and reputation-related cognition are considered. Infants seem to be prepared for a reputational world in that they are sensitive to social stimuli; approach or avoid social agents who act positively or negatively to others, respectively; and point interaction partners toward relevant information. Young children engage in verbal signaling (normative protests and tattling) about individuals who violate social norms. In middle childhood, the development of higher-order theory of mind leads to a fully explicit awareness of reputation as something that can be linguistically transmitted. Because of this, preadolescents start to engage in increased conflict regarding others’ verbal evaluations. Finally, during adolescence and adulthood, gossip becomes more covert, more ambiguous, and less openly negative. The driving force behind all these changes is seen as children’s progressive independence from adults and dependence on peer relationships.

Gossip, Reputation, and Language

Language is deeply involved in the management of human reputations. In this chapter, we review some of the linguistic features that relate to reputation, drawing extensively on ethnographic and experimental research. At the individual level, what the speaker says, and the physical form of speech contribute to establishing the public face of the speaker. At the interaction level, linguistic devices such as hedges and silences regulate the relations among speakers, expressing politeness, deference, acceptance, or rejection. Finally, linguistic speech acts such as apologies explicitly manipulate the speaker’s and others’ reputations. We also highlight some of the structural features of gossip, which is a genre of conversation that paradigmatically illustrates the role of language in reputation management.

Gossip, Reputation, and Sustainable Cooperation

Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroying cooperation. The reason seems straightforward: gossip can make or break someone’s reputation. This chapter puts this standard reputational model to closer scrutiny. It argues that there are at least three other models to consider, and it presents an analytical framework to disentangle similarities and differences between these models. Explicating all three roles in the gossip triad, it allows to distinguish (a) individual motives behind gossiping, (b) its reputation effects on the actors, (c) the impact of gossip and reputation on the quality and sustainability of cooperation, and (d) the role of the context. Applying the framework reveals a deep divide between reputation and punishment models propagated by experimental economics and evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and coalition and control models informed by sociology, on the other hand. The chapter discusses implications for a sociological research agenda.

Gossip, Internet-Based Reputation Systems, and Governance

Internet-based reputation systems allow to generate, process, and publish reputationally relevant information. They sustain practices that at first sight might appear to be an incarnation of traditional gossip, where a subject, “ego,” transmits evaluative information to others, “alter,” about an absent “tertius.” This chapter argues that such identification is inappropriate, and it proposes a characterization of gossip that is suited for the Internet Age. While being different in several ways, gossip and Internet-based reputation systems display a functional similarity: they both generate reputationally relevant information, which reverberates on the distribution of resources, hence of power. In generating such information, Internet-based reputation systems level the playing field and, in a sense, “democratize” gossip. Deliberate engineering could enhance this interesting characteristic of Internet-based reputation systems, particularly so in applications to public governance, which is an explicit focus of this chapter.