ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Explaining the evolution of gossip.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Dark Tetrad Traits Differentially Predict Gossip Frequency and Motives.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- An evolutionary approach to privacy and information-management psychology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- 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
- Indirect reciprocity under opinion synchronization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Computational evolution of social norms in well-mixed and group-structured populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A mechanistic model of gossip, reputations, and cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals' reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others' reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation. The evolution of gossip further facilitates these two functions of gossip and sustains the evolutionary cycle.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.