Gossip is often stereotyped as a frivolous social activity, but in fact can be a powerful tool for discouraging selfishness and cheating. In economic games, gossip induces people to act more cooperatively, presumably to avoid the cost of accruing a negative reputation. Might even this prosocial sort of gossip carry negative side effects? We propose that gossip might protect communities while simultaneously giving people the wrong idea about who's in them. Specifically, gossipers might disproportionately share information about cheaters in their midst, driving cynical perceptions among receivers of that gossip. To test these predictions, we first reanalyzed data from a prior study in which people played a public goods game and could gossip about their fellow players. These participants indeed produced negatively skewed gossip: writing much more frequently about cheaters than cooperators, even when most people in their public goods game groups acted generously. To examine the effect of this gossip on cynicism, we ran a new experiment in which a second generation of participants read these gossip notes, and then prepared to play their own public goods game. Gossip recipients inferred that the groups that produced these notes acted significantly more selfishly than they truly had–becoming both cynical and inaccurate based on gossip. However, this gossip did not affect second generation participants' forecasts of how their own group would behave, nor their own cooperative choices. Together, these findings suggest that gossip skews negative, and, therefore, encourages outside observers to draw more cynical conclusions about groups from which it comes.

中文翻译：

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亲社会八卦在推动不准确的社会观念方面的讽刺作用


八卦通常被刻板印象为一种轻浮的社交活动，但实际上可以成为阻止自私和欺骗的有力工具。在经济游戏中，流言蜚语会促使人们更加合作地行动，大概是为了避免积累负面声誉的代价。即使是这种亲社会的八卦也会带来负面的副作用吗？我们建议八卦可以保护社区，同时让人们对社区中的人物产生错误的想法。具体来说，八卦者可能会不成比例地分享他们中间的作弊者的信息，从而在八卦的接收者中产生愤世嫉俗的看法。为了检验这些预测，我们首先重新分析了之前一项研究的数据，在该研究中，人们玩公共产品游戏并可能八卦他们的其他玩家。这些参与者确实产生了负面的八卦：写关于作弊者的文章比写合作者的频率要高得多，即使他们的公共产品游戏组中的大多数人都表现得很慷慨。为了研究这种八卦对犬儒主义的影响，我们进行了一项新的实验，让第二代参与者阅读这些八卦笔记，然后准备玩他们自己的公共产品游戏。八卦接收者推断，制作这些笔记的团体的行为比他们实际的行为要自私得多——根据八卦变得既愤世嫉俗又不准确。然而，这些八卦并未影响第二代参与者对他们自己群体行为方式的预测，也不会影响他们自己的合作选择。总之，这些发现表明八卦偏向于消极，因此鼓励外部观察者对其来源群体得出更多愤世嫉俗的结论。