ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive mechanisms underlying the recall of positive relationships in social networks.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Young children understand how social connections affect what people know about each other.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social networks are composed of many ties among many individuals. These ties enable the spread of information through a network, including gossip, which comprises a sizeable share of daily conversation. Given the number of possible connections between people in even the smallest networks, a formidable challenge is how to strategically gossip-to disseminate information as widely as possible without the target of the gossip finding out. Here we find that people achieve this goal by leveraging knowledge about topological properties, specifically, social distance and popularity, using a gossip-sharing task in artificial social networks (experiments 1-3, N = 568). We find a similar pattern of behaviour in a real-world social network (experiment 4, N = 187), revealing the power of these topological properties in predicting information flow, even in much noisier, complex environments. Computational modelling suggests that these adaptive social behaviours rely on mental representations of information cascades through the social network.
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Registered trials
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