Multiple gossip statements and their effect on reputation and trustworthiness
Open accessAbstract
Empirical and theoretical evidence from various disciplines indicates that reputation, reputation building and trust are important for human cooperation, social behaviour and economic progress. Recently, it has been shown that reputation gained in games of indirect reciprocity can be transmitted by gossip. But it has also been shown that gossiping has a strong manipulative potential. We propose that this manipulative potential is alleviated by the abundance of gossip. Multiple gossip statements give a better picture of the actual behaviour of a person, and thus inaccurate or fake gossip has little power as long as it is in the minority. In addition, we investigate the supposedly strong connection between reciprocity, reputation and trust. The results of this experimental study (with 11 groups of 12 students each) document that gossip quantity helps to direct cooperation towards cooperators. Moreover, reciprocity, trust and reputations transferred via gossip are positively correlated. This interrelation might have helped to reach the high levels of cooperation that can be observed in humans.
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Previous findings on effects of social influence in terms of gossip on behavior indicate the effect is stronger if gossip comes from fewer sources.
“This matches previous findings on the effects of social influence in terms of gossip on the behavior, which seems to be stronger if gossip comes from fewer sources (34).”
From How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect (2011) · cites this paper as [34]
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- Authors
- Sommerfeld, R. D., Krambeck, H.-J., & Milinski, M.
- Affiliations
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (DE)
- Max Planck Society (DE)
- ORCID
- Milinski, Manfred
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2008-07-29
- Volume
- 275
- Issue
- 1650
- Pages
- 2529-2536
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- PMC
- PMC2603203
- OpenAlex
- W2125299127
- Cited by
- 158
- References
- 73
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 14 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 27.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- gossip, reputation, trustworthiness, indirect reciprocity, cooperation, trust, reputation building
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Austria, Cooperative Behavior, Germany, Humans, Social Behavior, Social Desirability, Observation, Information Dissemination, Trust
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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