summary: New research investigates how gossip affects cooperation and behavior. Researchers have found that gossip helps maintain social order by disseminating information about reputations, which in turn encourages cooperative behavior.
Their mathematical model shows the amount of gossip needed to achieve consensus and highlights the effects of biased information. These findings provide insight into the role of gossip in social dynamics and its potential applications.
Important facts:
- Gossip promotes cooperation: Gossip helps maintain social order and promote cooperative behavior.
- mathematical model: This study presents a model that shows how much gossip is needed to reach consensus.
- Effect of bias: Depending on its nature, biased gossip can either promote or hinder cooperation.
sauce: University of Pennsylvania
Gossip often has negative connotations, but imagine you are part of a group that decides which candidates to hire or which local political candidates to support. 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 describes how indirect reciprocity plays a central role in X, formerly known as Twitter, and how disagreements about reputation and in-group and out-group dynamics can foster bad behavior. I’ve also looked at some things.
“A system of morality and reputation ensures that good actors are rewarded and bad actors are punished, so that good behavior spreads, but bad behavior does not.” Kessinger said. says.
“If you punish bad actors, you have to make sure others agree that they are doing bad things. Otherwise they might see you as the villain.” 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 the interaction takes the form of a donation game, where each “donor” cooperates with each “recipient” by paying a cost to provide a benefit or not. Choose.
Everyone acts once as a donor and once as a recipient. 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.
The authors note that behavioral strategies vary. Some always cooperate, some always betray, and some discriminate. In other words, we cooperate when the recipient has a good reputation, and we betray when the recipient has a bad reputation.
The researchers found that both forms of gossip tended to increase agreement about reputation, which in turn improved the discriminator’s reputation balance.
Therefore, if the gossip continues long enough, the discriminators can eventually defeat the collaborators and defectors. This is a good result. This is because discriminators are highly cooperative with each other and stable against uncooperative behavior.
The researchers also found that biased gossip, or the spread of misinformation, can promote or hinder cooperation, depending on the size of the gossip and whether the bias is positive or negative. .
However, as gossip becomes more exposed to unbiased “noise,” people have to gossip longer to stabilize the equilibrium.
Kawakatsu next wants to consider how information flow interacts with altruism. The paper also suggests that future research should explore how the number of gossip sources affects cooperation, the conditions that cause rifts in individuals’ views, and how biases differ for in-group and out-group members. It has been stated that there is a possibility of investigating whether it applies.
Joshua B. Plotkin is the Walter H. Annenberg and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mari Kawakatsu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences at Penn State and a member of the Penn State Center for Mathematical Biology..
Taylor Kessinger is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology in Penn State College of Arts and Sciences.
This research was supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation (Postdoctoral Award in Dynamic and Multiscale Systems Understanding doi:10.37717/2021-3209) and the John Templeton Foundation (Grant #62281).
About this social neuroscience research news
author: Erica Moser
sauce: University of Pennsylvania
contact: Erica Moser – University of Pennsylvania
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Closed access.
“Mechanism Model of Gossip, Reputation, and Cooperation” by Mari Kawakatsu et al. PNAS
abstract
A mechanistic model of gossip, reputation, and cooperation.
Social reputation fosters cooperation. People who help others gain a good reputation and are more likely to receive help themselves.
However, this cycle of indirect reciprocity breaks down when people develop private opinions about each other, leading to perceptions that disagreement is unfair and ultimately undermining cooperation. Masu.
Theoretical studies often assume that the population as a whole agrees about reputation and invoke rapid gossip as an endogenous mechanism for reaching consensus.
However, theories of indirect reciprocity lack a mechanistic explanation of how gossip actually generates agreement.
Here, we develop a mechanistic model of gossip-based indirect reciprocity that incorporates two alternative forms of gossip: exchanging information with randomly selected peers or consulting a single gossip source.
Appropriate transformations of the parameters show that these two forms of gossip are mathematically equivalent. We derive an analytical formula for the minimum amount of gossip necessary to reach sufficient agreement and stabilize cooperation.
We analyze how the amount of gossip required for cooperation depends on the benefits and costs of cooperation, evaluation rules (social norms), reputation evaluation, strategy implementation, and errors in gossip transmission.
Finally, we show that biased gossip can promote or hinder cooperation, depending on the direction and magnitude of the bias.
Our results contribute to the growing literature on communication-facilitated cooperation and highlight the need to study strategic interactions combined with the dissemination of social information.
