ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Competitive gossip: the impact of domain, resource value, resource scarcity and coalitions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Dark Tetrad Traits Differentially Predict Gossip Frequency and Motives.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Multiple Reputations: Selective Attention to Competence and Character.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- Gossiping for a reason: Revised Gossip Functions Questionnaire.Psychological test adaptation and development : official open access organ of the European Association of Psychological Assessment · 2024Article
- Nasty and Noble Notes: Interdependence Structures Drive Self-Serving Gossip.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- New perspectives on the evolution of women's cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- The motive of competition but not courtship positively correlates with self-reported use of aggressive humor: A critical test of the contests- vs. mate-choice hypotheses.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Networks of reliable reputations and cooperation: a review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Gossip and reputation in everyday life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation: cross-checking and social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Parochial cooperation and the emergence of signalling norms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Those with better reputations often obtain more resources than those with poorer reputations. Consequently, gossip might be an evolved strategy to compete for valuable and scarce material and social resources. Influenced by models of non-human primate competition, we test the hypotheses that gossip: (i) targets aspects of reputation relevant to the domain in which the competition is occurring, (ii) increases when contested resources are more valuable, and (iii) increases when resources are scarcer. We then test hypotheses derived from informational warfare theory, which proposes that coalitions strategically collect, analyse and disseminate gossip. Specifically, we test whether: (iv) coalitions deter negative gossip, and (v) whether they increase expectations of reputational harm to competitors. Using experimental methods in a Mechanical Turk sample (
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