Review of General Psychology
2004, Vol. 8, No. 2, 100 –110

Copyright 2004 by the Educational Publishing Foundation
1089-2680/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.8.2.100

Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective
R. I. M. Dunbar
University of Liverpool
Conversation is a uniquely human phenomenon. Analyses of freely forming conversations indicate that approximately two thirds of conversation time is devoted to social
topics, most of which can be given the generic label gossip. This article first explores
the origins of gossip as a mechanism for bonding social groups, tracing these origins
back to social grooming among primates. It then asks why social gossip in this sense
should form so important a component of human interaction and presents evidence tosuggest that, aside from servicing social networks, a key function may be related
explicitly to controlling free riders. Finally, the author reviews briefly the role of social
cognition in facilitating conversations of this kind.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, gossip
has acquired a decidedly shady reputation. It isseen as malicious, destructive, and largely reprehensible. Describing a person as an “old gossip” implies someone with more time on theirhands than they know what to do with, toomuch hanging over the garden gate waiting forsome passerby to pause for idle chat. To engage
in gossip is to speak ill of one’s fellows, tointerfere with the smooth running of the social
relationships within which we are all embedded: in a word, to undermine the very fabric ofsociety. Yet, the term gossip itself did not originally have that meaning. It meant simply theactivity that one engaged in with one’s “godsibs,” one’s peer group equivalent of godparents: in other words, those with whom one was
especially close.
Whether it is in fact the case that tale-telling
and tittle-tattle are all that we do with our nearest and dearest is, perhaps, a moot point. I want,instead, to focus on the broader nature of thisactivity and argue that gossiping (though perhaps not gossip in its contemporary maliciousform) is the core of human social relationships,
indeed of society itself. Without gossip, there
would be no society. In short, gossip is whatmakes human society as we know it possible.

To be able to make this claim, I need first to
step back in evolutionary time to what we mightsee as the ancestral state from which modern
humans sprang. This is the nature of social
relationships that pertain among our primate
cousins. I then argue that language evolved as amechanism for bonding large social groups, andthat it does so precisely because it allows us toexchange information about the state of oursocial networks. In this context, the problem offree riders (those who take the benefits of sociality without paying the costs) is a central issue
for which gossip provides a particularly powerful mechanism of control.

Origins

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to R. I. M. Dunbar, Economic and Social Science
Research Council Research Centre in Economic Learning
and Social Evolution, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Crown Street, Liverpool L69 7ZB,
England. E-mail: rimd@liv.ac.uk

Humans are members of the order primates, alarge and diverse group of mammals of veryancient lineage. We belong to that subgroup of
primates known as the catarrhines, the Old
World monkeys and apes. We share with thesemonkeys and apes a deep sociality that is predicated on relatively (by comparison with othermammals and birds) advanced forms of social
cognition. This is represented in humans bysuch phenomena as theory of mind (Astington,
1993; Whiten, 1991; Wimmer & Perner, 1983)
and more advanced forms of the intentional
stance (Kinderman, Dunbar, & Bentall, 1998),
which appear to be unique to humans (Call &Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello & Call, 1998).
(The “intentional stance” is the phenomenon ofinterpreting behavior in terms of the belief
states of the mind that is behind the behavior,something that seems to be especially charac-

100

SPECIAL ISSUE: GOSSIP IN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

teristic of humans [Dennett, 1983].) Social cognition in these respects is based on the reflexively hierarchical phenomenon of mind-reading, the ability reflected in the claim that I
suppose that you believe that I want you to thinkthat X is the case.
The extent to which other monkeys and apes
share these particular capacities is not germaneto the thesis of this article. The issue is morethat Old World monkey and ape social relationships seem to be underpinned by relatively sophisticated forms of social cognition that findtheir fullest expression in the reflexive multilevel hierarchy of intentionality that we find inliving humans. I return to this particular issue inthe final section; first, I simply want to establish
why it is that the capacity to exchange information (i.e., language) evolved at all in humans.
Anthropoid primate societies (and especiallythose of the Old World monkeys and apes) arecharacterized by an intensity of sociality that is
not as conspicuous in other species. These species are deeply social; they are social in a sensethat is all too readily apparent to anyone who
has ever taken the trouble to spend any timeobserving their behavior. This intensity of sociality depends on two key phenomena. One is theability to understand something of the workingsof another’s mind. By this, I do not mean tosuggest that monkeys and apes understand that
other individuals have minds in the way that wehumans take this for granted. Theirs is more theethologist’s skill at reading behavior (Cheney &Seyfarth, 1990). In effect, they are good atunderstanding correlations in behavior: that individuals behave in certain consistent ways thatcan vary widely from one individual to another,that others’ behavior can be deliberately manipulated to one’s own advantage.
The second feature underpinning primate sociality is the use of trust and (in a weak sense)
obligation to ensure that relationships work effectively and do the job they are intended to do.
For monkeys and apes, predators are the single
most important factor influencing group size:
As a species’ ecological habits expose it toincreased risk of attack by predators, so its
group size must be proportionately larger toprotect its members (for reviews, see Dunbar,
1988, 1996a). Although protection against predators can be seen as clearly advantageous forprimates, it is important not to lose sight of thefact that sociality has costs as well as benefits.

101

Living together exposes animals to a number ofstresses that include disturbances to feedingwhen one animal displaces another from a feeding site, harassment by more dominant individuals, and the generally disruptive effects thatarise from the fact that animals in social groups
are obliged to coordinate their behavior in waysthat are not always ideal for each individual.
Because the consequences of predation are so
final for the individual, the costs of sociality
must be held in check to minimize their impact;
otherwise, the centrifugal forces of individuals’
selfish demands will rapidly and inevitably result in the dispersal of the group. Sociality, inshort, demands compromise on one’s personal,
short-term objectives so that one gains in thelonger term through a greatly reduced risk offalling victim to a predator.
The primate solution to this problem (essentially the need to balance short-term interests
against the longer term gains to be had throughgroup living) is the formation of alliances. Often, these alliances are deeply rooted in matrilineal relationships (mothers and daughters, sisters). These relationships work (and are crucial
in the life histories of the animals themselves)because they involve a strong element of trustand commitment. An alliance member can berelied on to come to one’s aid at the crucial
moment when one is under attack. That sense ofobligation is created through social grooming.
We do not really understand how grooming
makes this possible, though we do know thatgrooming is extremely effective at releasing
endorphins (endogenous opiates produced naturally by the brain as part of the body’s pain
control system; Keverne, Martensz, & Tuite,1989). The flood of opiates triggered by being
groomed (and perhaps even by the act ofgrooming itself) generates a sense of relaxation(grooming lowers heart rate, reduces signs of
nervousness such as scratching, and can so relax
the groomee that it may even fall asleep;
Goosen, 1981).
We are ourselves familiar with these effects,
because we show a striking preference for resorting to old-fashioned primate grooming in
our more intimate relationships; here language
is an inadequate means for communicating deep
inner feelings (and especially emotions), and we
often resort to physical contact forms of communication (rubbing, stroking, patting, and petting) that are extremely effective at triggering

102

DUNBARthe release of endorphins. As the endorphins
triggered by these behaviors begin to flood thebody, we experience a rising sense of warmth, afeeling of peace with the world, of well-being
toward those with whom we share such experiences of intimacy. The effect is instantaneousand direct: The physical stimulation of touchtells us more about the inner feelings of the“groomer,” and in a more direct way, than any
words could possibly do.
The key issue at this point is that the amountof grooming that primates do is directly related
to the size of the groups they live in, apparently
because the effectiveness with which an allianceworks is a simple function of the amount of time
devoted to grooming by its members. Although,within a species, alliance size does not vary
greatly as group size increases, the effectivenesswith which the alliance must work does correlate with group size. As group size increases,
individuals are subjected to increasing levels of
ecological competition (local food sources are
exhausted more quickly, forcing animals tosearch more widely for food) and reproductive
stress (harassment by others is sufficient to destabilize a female’s menstrual hormone cycles,
leading to anovulatory or infertile cycles; for areview, see Dunbar, 1988). The more stress
imposed on the individual, the more effective its
alliances must be to buffer it against thesestresses. Because there must be an upper limiton the amount of time that can be devoted tosocial grooming, there will inevitably be an
upper limit on the size of the group that can bebonded by this mechanism (Dunbar, 1998a). In
actuality, of course, grooming time is constrained by the fact that animals have to forage
for food. In practice, it seems that there is anupper limit on the amount of time that any given
group of primates devote to grooming, and thisis about 20% of the total waking time in eachday. Given the nature of the activity, this is, ofcourse, a very substantial amount of time:
Roughly one fifth of the day is being devoted tosocial investment.
More important, however, this figure isequivalent to a group size of about 80 animals(Dunbar, 1992, 1998a). (Note that these values
correspond to the mean group sizes for individual species, not the maximum possible groupsizes that we might observe.) The problem formodern humans is that we have a natural groupsize of about 150 individuals (roughly equiva-

lent to the number of individuals one knows
personally; Dunbar, 1993; Hill & Dunbar, inpress). At some point in our evolutionary history, hominid groups began to push against theceiling on group size. The only way they could
have broken through this ceiling so as to live ingroups larger than about 80 individuals was tofind an alternative mechanism for bonding inwhich the available social time was used more
efficiently.
Language appears to serve that function perfectly, precisely because it allows a significant
increase in the size of the interaction group(Dunbar, 1993, 1996b). Grooming is very mucha one-on-one activity (it still is, even for us),whereas conversation group sizes typically contain up to four individuals (invariably one
speaker and three listeners; Dunbar, Duncan, &Nettle, 1995). In addition, speaking is something that we can do simultaneously with mostother activities. As a result, we can “time share”
more effectively to cram more into what limited
time we do have available. Significantly perhaps, it turns out, from a sample of people’s
time budgets drawn from a wide range of cultures around the world, that the average percentage of time humans spend in social interaction(mainly conversation, of course) is 20% (Dunbar, 1998b). In other words, our social time
allocation is at the upper limit of that seen in
primates; we simply use the time more efficiently because language allows us to do so.
Note that neither of these benefits requires
more than speech; content is not explicitly required, because all that is necessary is to convey
a message of social commitment (“I consider it
more important standing here talking to you
than being over there with [. . . anyone else]”).
However, one further key feature of language isparticularly important to the bonding of ourunusually large social groups, namely the factthat language allows us to exchange information. That, after all, is what language itself isbasically designed to do. Its role in social bonding is that it allows us to keep track of what isgoing on within our social networks, as well as
using it to service those relationships. As important as the latter function is, it is in many
ways the first that is especially important. Lacking language, monkeys and apes are constrainedin what they can know about their networks.
They know only what they see. We are similarly
limited when it comes to first-hand knowledge.

SPECIAL ISSUE: GOSSIP IN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

But language allows us to seek out what has
been going on behind our backs. Indeed, we caneven be proactive about it and tell our friends
and relations what we have seen when we thinkit might be in their interests to know.
Let me summarize the argument thus far.
Primates live in groups to protect themselves
against predation, and group size increases as
predation risk increases. But group living comesat a cost in terms of the stresses it imposes on
the individual. Monkeys and apes solve thisproblem by forming alliances that buffer themagainst these costs, thus facilitating the cohesion of large social groups. These alliances arebonded through social grooming (a process thatis mediated pharmacologically through the release of endorphins), but the cohesion of largesocial groups also depends on a unique form ofcognitive engagement that allows animals tounderstand and exploit the mental states of otherindividuals. Sociality in primates is thus dependent on a two-pronged process. One involves
heavy cognitive demands, in which any specieslevel increases in group size that are required toallow animals to exploit more predator-risky
habitats are necessarily predicated on corresponding increases in brain size (and explicitly
frontal lobe size) to handle the social cognitive
demands of managing proportionately more relationships. The other is a more ancient process
based on the exploitation of grooming-based
pharmacological mechanisms that facilitate
bonding so as to allow the processes of mutual
support on which group cohesion ultimately
depends to work effectively.
The evolutionary sequence here is this: Exploitation of more predator-risky habitats requires an increase in group size; to make thispossible, it is necessary both to evolve the cognitive machinery to underpin the managementof the social relationships involved (essentiallya larger neocortex) and to invest more time in
the necessary bonding processes. Humans represent the most extreme point in this sequence
within the primates because hominid evolution
has been characterized by the exploitation ofincreasingly open terrestrial habitats, both ofthese features being associated with increased
predation risk. It may be that in the later stagesof hominid (human?) evolution, the risk of predation by other humans became more important
than the risks of predation by more conventional
predators (Johnson & Earle, 1987), but this does103

not obviate the fundamental issue that risk ofdeath from predators (of whatever kind) is theprincipal factor favoring increases in group size.
Language became part of this story because, atsome point in hominid evolutionary history, thegroup size required exceeded that which could
be bonded through social grooming alone; theconstraint in this context was the fact that thetime investment required by grooming is ultimately limited by the demands of foraging.
Language enabled hominids to break throughthat particular glass ceiling because it allows
time to be used more effectively than is possible
with grooming: Speech allows us both to interact with a number of individuals simultaneously(grooming is a strictly one-on-one activity) andto exchange information about the state of oursocial network (lacking language, monkeys andapes are limited in their knowledge of their
network by what they themselves see). In thenext section, I elaborate on this theme by arguing that the exchange of social information (i.e.,
gossip) has been crucial to our ability as a
species to evolve large social groups.

The Functions of Gossip
A strong case can, then, be made for thesuggestion that language evolved to facilitate
the bonding of large social groups. It achieves
this mainly because it allows us to increase thesize of our broadcast network (the number ofpeople with whom we can communicate directly and indirectly) and because it allows us toexchange information about changes that occur
within our social networks. We can catch up on
news of Uncle Joe and Aunt Jane, discover thatSusan and Bill have parted company (and so
avoid an embarrassing faux pas that might otherwise have upset what had once been a good
relationship), and learn about new additions to
the family.
But language allows us to do much more than
this. We can use language in at least four otherways (there may be others too, of course, butthese will at least serve to illustrate the point I
want to make here). One is to seek advice or to
discuss hypothetical situations: “How would
you behave if . . . ?” A second is to provide us
with a kind of policing function to control those
who fail to abide by the formal and informal
agreements that underpin society. (I have more
to say about this particular issue in the next

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DUNBAR

section.) The third possibility is that we can use
language to advertise ourselves: Look at all mywonderful qualities as a potential mate or ally.
Finally, in a variant on the last, we can use
language to deceive: to tell others what we think
it would help us for them to know, as when Iago
poisoned Othello’s mind against Desdemona.
It is perhaps important to appreciate that,
although we can use language in all of theseways and possibly more, all of them are reallyderivative of the fact that language evolved toallow us to bond large social groups. None ofthese additional functions would really be relevant (or so intrusive) if we did not first live inlarge groups. In contrast, without language as ameans of exchanging information about the social network, large groups could not be kept
together as viable, coherent social entities. So
although we may use language to deceive or
police, the possibility of being able to use it inthis way would not exist without there being
large groups in the first place.
However, we should first ask what evidence
there is that language is used in these various
ways. In part, this really concerns the distinction
between social and technical uses of language.
Language is concerned with the exchange of
information; that, after all, is what it (or, at least,
grammar) is mainly designed to do. However,linguists and those in most other disciplines
interested in language have traditionally assumed that the information to be exchanged isfactual knowledge about the world; in otherwords, language evolved to allow our ancestors
to exchange information about aspects of thephysical world in which they lived. “This is
how you make a good spear. . . . If you throw
your spear this way, you are more likely to kill
the prey. . . . I just saw some bison down by thelake as I was passing, so let’s go hunt them. . . .
Never swim in the river because crocodiles [ordangerous spirits] live there and will grab you!”
Of course, we can do amazing technicalthings only because we have language: Without
language, Pythagoras would not have been able
to explain his theorem, Newton would never
have been able to expound on the nature ofgravity, and probably none of their fellow men
and women would have been the slightest bitinterested in their rather exotic theories because
they would not have seen the relevance of them.
Who cares if the square on the hypotenuse isequal to the sum of the squares on the other twosides? Should I care why apples fall to earth solong as I can pick them up? It is enough that weknow that they do! The reality, however, is that
language allows us to stand, as Newton somemorably put it, on the shoulders of the giants
who went before us; language, and nothing else,
has made the spectactular growth of knowledge
in the last few centuries possible.
This technological or economic view of what
language is used for has so deeply colored our
perception of the function of language that it has
led us to see any other uses of language as
trivial and largely driven by the boredom of
idleness. Thus has gossip acquired its ill repute,for it is seen as mere time wasting when we
could be doing something really useful with ourtime such as talking about jet engines or thetechnical details of how to earn more money bymaking our businesses more efficient. The realissue here, then, is which of these two broad
uses of language is the chicken, and which is theegg? In other words, did language evolve tofacilitate the exchange of technological information (with gossip as an idle by-product), or
did it evolve to facilitate the exchange of social
information (with the exchange of technologicalinformation as a useful by-product)?
The issue here is a purely empirical one: How
do we use language? What do we actually talkabout? My colleagues and I have carried out anumber of observational studies of the content
of conversations. All of these studies have been
undertaken in public places, and we simply notethe topic under discussion in free-running conversations at 30-s intervals. To ease the processof classification for the observer and avoid
problems of unnecessary intrusion, we use only
broadly defined categories (e.g., social, politics,
sports, music and culture, and technical). The“social” category covers anything that has to dowith explicitly social activities, personal relationships, and personal likes or dislikes. Our
aim here is to try to gain a basic description of
how people use language in relaxed everyday
situations.
It is worth pointing out that almost all of thework carried out hitherto on conversations has
been subject to one or both of two key distortions, namely the use of artificially convened
groups or a focus on workplace environments.
These circumstances introduce distortions because the situations are unnatural (despite thelength of time we might be said to spend in our

SPECIAL ISSUE: GOSSIP IN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

places of work). Such distortions have not reallybeen an issue in previous studies, because theseinvestigations have focused on aspects of conversational behavior other than topic of conversation (e.g., the mechanics of conversation, howconversations are paced, and the cues used insignaling switching of roles; Beattie, 1983;
Coates, 1993). However, these artificialities introduce serious distortions when our concern isto assess whether or not conversations are used
to service existing relationships, because mostsuch situations either do not involve individuals
who have relationships or focus on contexts inwhich relationships are of a very specific andshort-term nature (e.g., workplace relationships). It would be futile (and bizarre) to try to
study how (or, worse still, whether) language isused to service social relationships by ensuringthat there were no relationships to be serviced.
In our design, participants can talk about relationships if they feel them to be important, but
not if they do not wish to do so.
The results we have obtained from a series ofstudies in different locations have been very
consistent: Social topics (what I here define
broadly as “gossip”) account for approximately
65% of speaking time, with only limited variation due to age or gender (Dunbar, Duncan, &Marriott, 1997; Seepersand, 1999). All of theother topics summed together account for only
about one third of conversation time. Thus,
these findings suggest that naturally occurring
conversations are dominated by social topics.
Although non-European conversations have yet
to be extensively studied in this way, there isnothing in the ethnographic literature (or, indeed, my own experience of traditional African
societies) to suggest that members of other cultures behave differently. The one study that did
involve an analysis of conversation content in a
non-European population (in this case, Zinacantan Indians in Mexico) showed that 78% of
topics recorded in 1,754 conversations wereconcerned with social issues (Haviland, 1977).
(This study did not sample conversation topics
at a set time interval, but rather counted all of
the different topics that were talked about in a
substantial number of conversations.) However,less systematic evidence suggests that social
gossip has always been important: In medieval
Europe, for example, a person’s fama (or reputation) was highly dependent on what others
said about him or her and was thus a source of105

considerable personal angst as well as something to be manipulated by others in conversations (Fenster & Smail, 2003). Indeed, Emler(1990) has argued that reputation management
is a major objective of gossip even in modern
societies.
If language is principally used for social exchanges in everyday life, then the obvious nextquestion is how language is used to facilitatesocial relationships in groups. I noted earlier
that there are at least four different ways inwhich language might contribute to this: keeping track of other individuals in the network;
advertising one’s own advantages as a friend,ally, or mate (or perhaps the disadvantages ofpotential rivals); seeking advice on personal
problems; and, finally, policing free riders. We
attempted to assess the relative balance among
these four possible functions by analyzing in
greater detail social topics of conversation. The
results of this more detailed study of 30 freely
formed conversations revealed, somewhat toour surprise, that most social conversation timein our sample was devoted to the first two topics(in about equal quantities). Soliciting advice
and policing free riders each accounted for only
about 5% of total social conversation time
(Dunbar et al., 1997).
I express surprise here because we had anticipated that the free rider problem (as described
subsequently) would be so intrusive in everyday
life that it would result in constant need of thepolicing function. That policing free riders
seemed to be so rare a topic of conversation
could be due to the particular circumstances
under which we made our observations, which
took place in open public environments (cafes,
restaurants, bars, and trains). It may well be thatpeople are reluctant to discuss more intimate
topics in public, where they may be overheard;
such conversations may be confined to moreprivate venues. If we were to sample conversations across the full range of an individual’stime, it might be that more conversation time
would be devoted to these two topics. Alternatively, it may be that these kinds of topics rear
their ugly head only at relatively infrequentintervals. The need to discuss such topics may
be rare, but when they occur they may, ofcourse, be disproportionately important in the
lives of the individuals concerned because theconsequences of being exploited by a free rider
are especially damaging.

106

DUNBARIn summary, then, language in freely forming
natural conversations is principally used for theexchange of social information. That such topics are so overwhelmingly important to us suggests that this is a primary function of language.
It is interesting in this context to note that mostsocial topics focus on events in one’s social
network and using language to promote one’s
particular social opportunities. Seeking advice
and engaging in policing functions seem to beless common. Notwithstanding the results justdescribed, the issue of free riders is one offundamental importance in human societies. In
the next section, I spell out the problem in moredetail and argue that the issue of abusive gossip
is directly derivative of this issue.

The Free Rider Problem
One reason why gossip has acquired its negative connotations is that conversation is sometimes genuinely used to comment on the behavior of, or caste aspersions on the character of,
those of whom we disapprove. One reason why
we might have a predisposition to behave in thisway is that free riders are extremely destructive
for societies based on a social compact.
I suggested earlier that the principal evolutionary innovation of the primates has been theirability to exploit social solutions to the everyday problems of survival and successful reproduction. Such solutions are dependent on an
implicit social contract whereby each individual
agrees to forgo some of his or her immediate
interests to gain in the long term through collaborative solutions to the ecological problems
that threaten everyday survival. However, social arrangements of this kind are extremely
susceptible to free riders, those who take thebenefits of sociality but decline to pay all of thecosts. Detailed mathematical modeling of virtual societies based on these kinds of social
contracts suggests that free riders become increasingly more intrusive as social group sizes
increase or society becomes more dispersed,
principally because under each of these conditions free riders benefit from having large numbers of naive individuals whom they can exploit(Enquist & Leimar, 1993). In this context, “naive” means individuals who have no knowledgeof the free rider’s behavior and thus interact
with the free rider in an open and trusting way,
thereby exposing themselves to exploitation.

The central problem for highly social species
is that it would be extremely inefficient to treat
everyone we come across with the level ofsuspicion and caution that would be required toensure that we are never exploited. To do sowould waste time and resources that could more
profitably be spent pursuing genuinely beneficial social opportunities. Indeed, in the final
analysis, sociality itself would break down because no one would be willing to cooperate, andhence the whole point of living together andsharing social activities would evaporate. If sociality is to provide us with the benefits it isdesigned to provide, then we have to be prepared to take risks and trust the bona fides of
those with whom we interact. It is this trustingness that provides the crucial loophole that freeriders exploit. In a word, free riding works as a
strategy mainly because most members of thecommunity take each other at face value.
As trusting as we often are, it is clear that freeriding is a serious social problem. We operatemany low-level defenses against free riders on adaily basis. We search each other’s faces andexpressions for cues of honesty and dishonesty.
Folk wisdom and our proverbs are littered withallusions to cues of honesty and dishonesty(e.g., “Never trust a man who cannot look you
in the eye”). We exert a level of caution against
strangers, testing their intentions first with small
gifts before we offer them our lives and souls;
conversely, when anxious to solicit large-scalefavors, we offer substantial gifts up front todeclare the honesty of our intentions. Nettle andDunbar (1997) used a modeling approach toshow that dialects are ideally suited to act as amechanism for controlling free riders, providingthat they change rapidly from one generation to
the next. Because they are difficult to acquire if
they are not learned early in life, dialects allow
community members to identify those who arelikely to share a common history of obligation(and hence to be trustworthy reciprocators).
But free riders need not always be strangers
who hove into view over the horizon from far
away. They may just as easily be members of
our community. Some may be individuals who
have always cut their relationships with a veryfine knife, ensuring that they never give toomuch away; others may be individuals who,
perhaps because of a change of circumstances,calculatedly seize an opportunity to exploit asituation to their advantage. We are always atSPECIAL ISSUE: GOSSIP IN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

risk from the individual whose natural characteris not to give too much away or who is willingto exploit friends and acquaintances when an
opportunity arises.
Indeed, in many ways, our attitude toward kin
and close friends tends to be much more exploitative than we might typically suppose: We
tend to take them for granted, make more social
effort on behalf of acquaintances or those we
see less often than those we know best. One
example of this is the fact that we tend to greet
distant acquaintances more effusively than wedo those whom we see more often (Kendon,1973), even though the latter are likely to be
more important to us in terms of support andsocial environment. Although this may partly
reflect the need to emphasize a nonthreatening
attitude toward those with whom we are lessfamiliar, it also implies that we are much more
willing to trade on the good nature of those withwhom we have well-established relationships.
The control of free riders is largely dependent
on memory of past events (occasions on which
they have cheated us or reneged on implicit
contracts) and an appreciation of how theymight afflict others (which depends on sophisticated cognitive abilities such as theory ofmind). However, although we may appreciate
the consequences for others of a free rider’sbehavior, until and unless we communicate ourconcerns there is no social component to theseconcerns. Only when we advise potential victims of the danger they face are we exercising
any kind of social censure. Language is clearlycentral to that process.
Enquist and Leimar (1993) modeled this situation using a form of evolutionary analysis
based on the well-known social psychologicalparadigm of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Theysought to identify the evolutionary-stable strategy (defined in evolutionary biology as thestrategy that cannot be outcompeted by any
alternative mutant strategy) that maximized thegenetic fitness of individual members of a community when these individuals had to collaborate with each other to reproduce successfully.
They showed that, under a range of realistic
assumptions, free riders who engaged in collaboration to accept resource donations but later
failed to repay these “gifts” would invariably
outreproduce conventional collaborators whobehaved honestly. In a social environment that
initially consisted of honest reciprocators and a107

single “mutant” free rider, the reciprocators
would, within a very small number of generations, be driven to extinction by the free riders.
However, if community members were able topass on even a modest amount of information
about the behavior of individual free riders, thefree riders’ freedom of movement would begreatly curtailed, and honest reciprocators
would be able to retain a dominating presence inthe population. Enquist and Leimar (1993) explicitly referred to this process of informationexchange as “gossip.”
Although, in our studies of freely forming
conversations, we found that gossip of this censorious type was relatively rare, it may nonetheless be that the handful of cases involving
this kind of behavior are disproportionately important in terms of their consequences for therecipients’ ability to avoid exploitation in the
future. This is clearly much less easy to study,
because it involves a long-term future andwould thus require the longitudinal study ofindividual participants over many months, perhaps even years. Such studies could (and, indeed, should!) be done, and they might best be
done with some kind of diary methodology;
however, they would inevitably be laborious
and very time consuming.
The potentially important role of verbal censure in controlling free riders has been studied
in a series of small group experiments conducted by Orstrom and colleagues (Orstrom,
Gardner, & Walker, 1994). In these experiments, participants were invited to make financial investments in one of two markets. Participants worked at individual computer terminals,
but the terminals were linked so that each participant could see all of the other bids being
made in the successive rounds of the game (butnot who was making them). The markets werestructured in such a way that whereas one
yielded a constant return, the other yielded returns that were an exponential function of thenumber of investors. Thus, participants playing
in these markets soon learned that the optimal
payout was gained only if everyone invested in
the second market. However, if not everyone
invested in this way, the payout was poorer than
could be gained by investing in the first market.
With the odds stacked to provide a temptation to
go it alone, the experiments yielded results inwhich the mean payout was typically as low as
20% of that which could have been achieved

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had everyone followed the collaborative strategy, even though everyone’s bids could clearly
be seen.
Orstrom et al. (1994) found that introducing
even a single refreshment break in which participants could meet significantly reduced thenumber of defections during subsequent rounds,
thus raising the mean payout to approximately
80% of the maximum. In these refreshment
breaks, individuals were allowed to discuss theexperiment, but they still did not know which
participants had been responsible for the defections in previous rounds. Thus, simply allowing
participants free reign to comment on the defections or to exhort the other participants to toe
the line had a dramatic effect in reducing thetemptation to defect (in other words, act as afree rider). In a subsequent experiment, participants were allowed to punish defectors during
the game (by requesting that a still anonymous
defector be fined by the experimenter), and thisresulted in a further dramatic improvement in
performance (and thus an increase in mean payout). However, by comparison with the opportunity to exhort free riders during the refreshment break, the additional gain provided by theopportunity to punish was modest.
These simple experiments suggest that eventhe opportunity to comment on the behavior offree riders can exert a significant effect on freeriders’ willingness to break ranks on implicit or
explicit social contracts. This provides confirmation that we are sensitive to others’ opinionsof us, such that other members of society can
exploit this sensitivity to keep us in line. This
does not, of course, mean that such a strategy
will work for everyone, but it seems that it
works sufficiently often to ensure that only arelatively small number of individuals try to
exploit the loopholes in the fabric of the socialworld.

Cognitive Underpinnings of Gossip
In the earlier sections, I alluded a number oftimes to the role of cognition (and particularly
the higher levels of social cognition) in managing primate and human social relationships. I
want to end by exploring the relevance of thisissue to gossip in a little more detail.
Social cognition (typically exemplified bytheory of mind) plays an important role in human relationships. The ability to see the worldfrom another person’s point of view is a fundamental prerequisite for successful social interaction. In the present context, it is important for
two reasons.
One is that it allows us to recognize thatsomeone else might be at risk of exploitation bya free rider even though we ourselves are not(because we have identified the free rider ortaken steps to neutralize his or her ability to
exploit us). Naive individuals lack that foresight, and we are able to recognize this only
because we can see the world from their point ofview and sympathize with their potential future
predicament. Conversely, having a theory ofmind (or, better still, more advanced levels ofcognition) allows free riders to act more effectively: Being able to put themselves in otherpeople’s mental shoes gives them a significant
advantage in identifying (and hence exploiting)potential victims.
The other respect in which social cognition isnecessary is that language itself probably requires at least second-order intentionality and,possibly, higher levels (Dunbar, 1998b). When
we engage in conversation, we can use words intheir literal sense, or we can use them metaphorically. Human conversation is littered with metaphor and is typically telegraphic in style. Inpart, that may reflect a desire for economy, butequally it reflects a desire to be less than directin what we have to say. We speak opaquely in
riddles to ensure that our real meaning is obscured from those we would rather did not discern it. This places a considerable load on bothspeaker and listener. The latter in particular has
to work very hard trying to figure out just what
it is that the speaker is trying to tell him or her.
This use of metaphor may be especially valuable in allowing us to comment on a certain
member of society in a manner only specificindividuals will understand.
Humans achieve second-order intentionality(formal theory of mind) at approximately 4
years of age (Astington, 1993), but normal
adults are capable of negotiating fourth- or perhaps even fifth-order intentionality (Kinderman
et al., 1998; Stiller & Dunbar, 2003). Suchlevels of sophistication probably play an important role in allowing us to dig deeply into theintentions and honesty of those with whom weinteract on a daily basis. They certainly influence the size of our social network (Stiller &Dunbar, 2003). However, we still have a very

SPECIAL ISSUE: GOSSIP IN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

poor understanding of the role of advanced social cognition in the everyday social interactions of normal adults. So far as I know, theKinderman et al. (1998) study and two unpublished studies (Stiller & Dunbar, 2003; Swarbrick, 2000) are the only studies that have attempted to explore intentionality beyond thesecond level (theory of mind).

Conclusion
I have argued that gossip, in the broad senseof conversation about social and personal topics, is a fundamental prerequisite of the humancondition. Were we not able to engage in discussions of these issues, we would not be able
to sustain the kinds of societies that we do.
Gossip in this broad sense plays a number ofdifferent roles in the maintenance of sociallyfunctional groups through time; although simple social bonding is perhaps the single mostimportant of these roles (and was perhaps theoriginal impetus to the evolution of language),
language permits other social functions. Of
these, the exchange of information on free riders has undoubtedly become important in thelarge dispersed societies of modern humans. In
some respects, its development may be seen asa natural outgrowth of our social brain, because
it exploits the intense interest that we naturally
have in the doings of others. That it can be
carried to extremes may be a matter for regret,but this should not distract us from the central
issue that gossip (in its broadest sense) is thecentral plank on which human sociality isfounded. In reality, the cognitive demands ofgossip are the very reason why such large brains
evolved in the human lineage.

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Received June 2, 2003
Revision received July 9, 2003
Accepted July 9, 2003 䡲

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