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Gossip often has negative connotations, but imagine you’re part of a group that supports your candidate or a local political candidate. Candidates who have a good reputation for helping others are more likely to receive help in the form of a job offer or recommendation. This is a feedback loop known as indirect reciprocity. Gossip promotes cooperation.
Previous research has shown that people are more likely to cooperate when they think their peers are gossiping about their actions, that gossip can help them avoid potential cheaters, and that gossip can help freeloaders. It has been shown that there is a possibility of punishment. However, little was understood about how much gossip is needed to promote cooperation and how inaccurate information affects the impact of gossip.
Researchers from the Plotkin Research Group in Mathematical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences studied this problem by creating a model that incorporated two sources of gossip: randomly selected people and a single source. . They showed that there is a mathematical relationship between these forms of gossip, meaning that understanding gossip from a single source will also help you understand gossip with colleagues, and developed an analytical formula for the amount of gossip required to reach a consensus and maintain cooperation.
Their discovery is Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The study of the spread of social information and the evolution of cooperative behavior are very mature fields, but there hasn’t been much research that combines them,” said lead author and postdoctoral researcher in the lab. Mari Kawakatsu says: This is the opinion of biology professor Joshua B. Plotkin, the paper’s lead author.
“By merging ideas from the two fields, we were able to develop a mechanistic model of how information diffusion facilitates cooperative behavior.”
Co-author Taylor A. Kessinger, a postdoctoral researcher with a background in physics, said the analysis focuses on the prohibition of gossip, that everyone’s opinion is personal and independent, and the importance of reputation. They say that this fills a significant gap in previous research, which suggests that gossip can be infinitely fast as long as it matches perfectly. Kessinger also explains how indirect reciprocity plays a central role on X, formerly known as his Twitter, and how disagreements about reputations and in-group and out-group dynamics can lead to bad behavior. I’ve also seen how it helps.
“A system of morality and reputation helps ensure that good actors are rewarded and bad actors are punished. In doing so, good behavior spreads, but bad behavior does not.” says Kessinger. “If you punish a bad person, you need to make sure that others agree that the person is doing bad things. Otherwise they may see you as a bad person. Gossip may be one way to accomplish this.
Plotkin says that while past research has taken the basic model of indirect reciprocity and added various complications, such as stereotypes, this paper goes back and fills a gap in theory. The paper provides a quantitative model that explains how many repetitions of gossip are enough for people to change their cooperative or uncooperative behavior, he says.
The paper includes a game-theoretic model in which interactions take the form of a donation game, in which each “donor” cooperates with each “receiver” by paying a cost to provide a benefit, or Choose whether. Every person acts as a donor and a recipient once. This is followed by a period of reputation gossip, in which each donor privately assesses the reputation of all donors by rating their behavior toward a randomly selected participant. Personal reviews and gossip continue until reputations are balanced.
For more information:
Mari Kawakatsu et al. “Mechanism Model of Gossip, Reputation, and Cooperation” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2400689121
Magazine information:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences