The Cooperative and Competitive Functions of Gossip
Authors:   , das Dores Cruz Terence Daniel 
Published: March 2024

My first goal was to provide a clear definition of gossip to provide the first step toward a better understanding of gossip. I tackled the confusion about what gossip is by proposing a broad definition of gossip: “a sender communicating to a receiver about a target who is absent or unaware of the content”. Beyond this definition, I identified two important characteristics of gossip on which gossip can vary: valence and formality. This dissertation mainly investigated gossip along the valence dimension to show that gossip with differing valence can serve both cooperative and competitive functions.

My second and main goal was to better understand the cooperative functions of gossip. I strongly supported theories about the cooperative functions of gossip. First, I showed that gossip was shared to describe whether others are likely cooperative or uncooperative in ways that enable the formation of impressions that can underlie a reputation system. Second, I showed that people largely believed the gossip they received and used accurate cues about the relationship context in which gossip occurs to guide to what extent they believed gossip. Third, I showed that people correspondingly used reputational information provided by gossip to shape how they think about the targets of gossip. Fourth, I showed that people were driven to share such gossip because they wanted to promote cooperation, they rewarded cooperative behavior and norm adherence with positive gossip and punished uncooperative behavior and norm violations with negative gossip. Finally, gossip-based impressions guided receivers’ cooperative behavior toward targets: they cooperated with people they learned are likely to be cooperative interaction partners and avoided people who they learned are likely to violate norms of cooperation.

Investigating these cooperative functions also revealed aspects of gossip that could align with competitive functions. This led to my third goal, to better understand the competitive functions of gossip. I provided some support for theories about the competitive functions of gossip. First, I found that in settings where gossipers are interdependent with other parties, people gossiped more in ways that could increase the chances of receivers behaving in ways that benefit them. Further, gossipers’ selfishness seemed particularly served by sharing positive gossip, both true and false. Second, I found that people formed impressions of others based on gossip, regardless of the extent to which they perceived the gossip to be true. This could serve the selfish goals of gossipers to manipulate impressions of others in a way that is beneficial to themselves. Finally, beyond impressions, I found that gossip also helped gossipers gain selfish benefits by shaping how receivers behave. Receivers tended to react to gossip in ways that led to them harm gossiper’s rivals or be harmed by gossipers’ allies.
My fourth and final goal was to take the first steps toward an integrative perspective that connects the cooperative and competitive functions of gossip. First, I proposed that cooperative versus competitive aspects of gossip are shaped by the context in which gossip occurs and whether the sender, receiver, or target is studied. I further built on this and specified the interdependence structure (i.e., the interdependence characterizing the relationship between each of the parties involved in gossip) as a key contextual factor. I further outlined and systematically tested how interdependence structures can determine whether gossip is likely to serve cooperative versus competitive functions. I showed that differences in the interdependence structure shaped whether the gossip people engaged in corresponded more to theories about gossip serving cooperative (independence between parties in the triad or interdependence between senders and receivers) versus competitive functions (interdependence between senders and targets).