Gossip influences whether people receive advantages, whether they work in an office in the US or India, or even in a remote village in Africa, a Washington State University study found.
In a series of experiments, WSU anthropologists found that positive and negative gossip influenced whether participants were willing to give a person a resource, such as a raise or a family heirloom, especially when the gossip was specific to the person. circumstance. For example, positive gossip about work-related behavior, such as saying the person worked well under pressure, increased participants’ willingness to give a work-related benefit compared to gossip about family relationships.
The researchers conducted the experiment with 120 participating online workers in the US and India, and after making some culturally appropriate adjustments, with 160 Ngandu horticulturists, who make a living with small gardens in the Central African Republic. In all three groups, they found similar results.
“Gossip seems relevant to the context. People don’t just say random things,” said Nicole Hess, a WSU anthropologist and lead author of the study published in the journal. Evolution and Human Behavior. “Gossip that was relevant to the exchange and relationship had the biggest impact on whether or not a person gave a resource.”
Gossip, defined as the exchange of information about the reputations of other members of the community, is considered by anthropologists to be a feature of nearly all human societies, but its function is less clear. Some argue that talking about other people in this way helps enforce social norms or serves as a social link between gossipers. This study provides evidence for yet another theory: that gossip is used competitively because it shows a direct relationship between gossip and the likelihood of receiving more resources.
“Until this study, no one had really asked ‘what is the end result of gossip?’ Gossip makes a person’s reputation worse or better, so what is the result?” Hess said. “These findings support the competitive evolutionary model — that people use gossip to compete with one another for valuable resources in their communities.”
For this study, Hess and co-author Ed Hagen, also a WSU anthropologist, developed a series of experiments that provided participants with scenarios related to work or family. For office workers in industrialized countries, the scenarios described a situation in which they could give a raise to one of their co-workers or an inherited painting to a family member.
They were then given a mix of gossip statements about how a theoretical co-worker or relative behaved at work or dealt with their family. For example, the statement of work could be about whether the colleague was willing to work late to finish a project, or on the family side, if you got along with his siblings.
After reading a combination of these statements, the participants were asked if they were willing to give the resource to that fictitious person.
For the Ngandu farmers, the work scenario was set up for them to assess a fictional worker they hired to help with their garden, and whether they would share some shirts with the worker given to them by a produce buyer. The family scenario consisted of deciding whether to give a relative some nice clothes that the participant had inherited.
Both surveys showed a similar pattern: participants were more willing to give the resource when exposed to more positive, context-specific gossip statements about them, and less willing when exposed to more negative, context-specific gossip statements.
In this article, the researchers also included an observational study of 40 Aka hunter-gatherers living near the Ngandu horticulturists. This study was designed as a series of verbal questions about real people the participants knew, which increased the ecological validity of the study, meaning it shows that the results can be generalized to real-life settings.
While not exactly paralleling the experimental studies, these observational results also indicated that an individual’s positive reputation strongly influenced whether Aka participants were willing to share a resource with them.
“The cultural contexts are different, but they have the same response patterns,” Hess said. “This seems to be the universal psychology in how people assess reputation by allocating things of value from industrial societies to small-scale communities.”