Gossip and Reputation in Everyday Life

Abstract

Gossip—a sender communicating to a receiver about an absent third party—is hypothesized 24 to impact reputation formation, partner selection, and cooperation. Lab experiments have 25 found that people gossip about others’ cooperativeness and that they use gossip to condition 26 their cooperation. Here, we move beyond the lab and test several predictions from theories of 27 indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner selection about the content of everyday 28 gossip and how people use it to update the reputation of others in their social network. In a 29 Dutch community sample (N = 309), we sampled daily events in which people either sent or 30 received gossip about a target over 10 days (ngossip =5,284). Gossip senders frequently shared 31 information about targets’ cooperativeness and did so in ways that minimize potential 32 retaliation from targets. Receivers overwhelmingly believed gossip to be true and updated 33 their evaluation of targets based on gossip. In turn, a positive shift in the evaluation of the 34 target was associated with higher intentions to help them in future interactions, and with 35 lower intentions to avoid them in the future. Thus, gossip is used in daily life to impact and 36 update reputations in a way that enables partner selection and indirect reciprocity.