Gossip often has a negative connotation, but imagine you’re part of a group deciding 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 job offers or recommendations. This is a feedback loop called indirect reciprocity. Gossip can foster cooperation.
Previous research has shown that people are more likely to cooperate when they believe their peers are gossiping about their actions, that gossip can help avoid potential cheaters, and that gossip can punish free riders. However, little is known about how much gossip is needed to promote cooperation, and how misinformation affects the effectiveness of gossip.
To study this issue, researchers in the Plotkin Research Group in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Mathematics and Biology created a model that incorporates two sources of gossip: randomly selected people and a single source. The researchers showed that there is a mathematical relationship between these forms of gossip — understanding single-source gossip helps us understand peer gossip — and developed an analytical formula for the amount of gossip needed to reach sufficient consensus and maintain cooperation.
The results of their research are Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The study of the diffusion of social information and the evolution of cooperative behavior are very mature fields, but there hasn’t been much work done to combine the two,” said first author Mari Kawakatsu, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Joshua B. Plotkin, professor of biology and senior author of the paper.
“By blending ideas from the two fields, we were able to develop a mechanistic model that shows how the diffusion of information benefits cooperative behavior.”
Co-author Taylor A. Kessinger, a postdoctoral researcher with a background in physics, says the analysis fills an important gap in previous research on gossip-free situations, where everyone has their own opinions privately and independently, and on infinitely fast gossip, where there is complete agreement on reputation. Kessinger has also seen the central role that indirect reciprocity plays on X (formerly Twitter), and how disagreements about reputation and in-group/out-group relationships can induce bad behavior.
“Moral and reputation systems help ensure that good actors are rewarded and bad actors are punished, so that good behavior spreads and bad behavior doesn’t,” Kessinger says. “If you punish bad actors, you need to make sure that others recognize their actions as bad behavior, or they might see you as a bad actor. Gossip is one way to achieve this.”
Plotkin said past studies have taken the basic model of indirect reciprocity and added various complexities, such as stereotyping, but this paper goes back to the theory and fills a gap in it. The paper offers a quantitative model that explains how much gossip is enough for people to change their cooperative or uncooperative behavior, he said.
The paper involves a game-theoretic model where the interaction takes the form of a donation game, where each “donor” chooses whether to cooperate with each “recipient” by paying a cost to provide benefits. Every individual acts once as a donor and once as a recipient. Then, each individual privately evaluates the reputation of every donor by evaluating their behavior towards randomly selected participants, followed by a period of reputation rumors. The private evaluations and rumors continue until reputation equilibrium is reached.
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
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania
Quote: Mechanistic model shows how much gossip is needed to foster social cooperation (May 15, 2024) Retrieved June 6, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-05-mechanistic-gossip-foster-social-cooperation.html
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