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 Plotkin Research Group in Mathematical Biology inside Faculty of Arts and Sciences studied this issue 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 was announced on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The study of the diffusion of social information and the study of the evolution of cooperative behavior are very mature fields, but there hasn’t been much research on combining them,” said the first author. Mari Kawakatsua postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of a biology professor. Joshua B. Plotkin Senior author of the paper. “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. KessingerHe, also a postdoctoral researcher with a background in physics, says this analysis is based on the prohibition of gossip, where everyone’s opinions are personal and independent, and where complete agreement about reputations leads to endless gossip. It states that it fills a significant gap in past research that exists. 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 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 need to make sure others agree that they are doing bad things. Otherwise they might see you as the villain.” Gossip may be one way he accomplishes this.
Plotkin notes that previous research has taken the basic model of indirect reciprocity and added various complexities. like a stereotype, this paper goes back to theory and fills the 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. 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.
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. . But because gossip becomes more susceptible to unbiased “noise”, or accidental mistakes, 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, Penn State College of Arts and Sciences. Penn Mathematical Biology Center.
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 Understanding Dynamic and Multiscale Systems). doi:10.37717/2021-3209) and the John Templeton Foundation (grant #62281).