Truth, Lies and Gossip
Peters, K; Fonseca, MA
Date: 26 May 2020
Journal
Psychological Science
Publisher
SAGE Publications / Association for Psychological Science
Publisher DOI
Abstract
It is widely assumed that people will share inaccurate gossip for their own selfish
purposes. This assumption, if true, presents a challenge to the growing body of work that
argues that gossip is a ready source of accurate reputational information and therefore is
welfare improving. We test this inaccuracy assumption by examining ...
It is widely assumed that people will share inaccurate gossip for their own selfish
purposes. This assumption, if true, presents a challenge to the growing body of work that
argues that gossip is a ready source of accurate reputational information and therefore is
welfare improving. We test this inaccuracy assumption by examining the frequency and
form of spontaneous lies shared between gossiping members of networks playing a series
of one-shot trust games (N=320). We manipulate whether gossipers are or are not
competing with each other. We show that lies make up a sizeable minority of messages,
and are twice as frequent under gossiper competition. However, this has no discernible
effect on trust levels. We attribute this to the finding that, one, gossip targets are
insensitive to lies, and two, some lies are welfare enhancing. These findings suggest that
lies need not prevent — and may help — gossip to serve reputational functions.
Management
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
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