Gossip for social control in natural and artificial societies

  • Authors:
  • Francesca Giardini;Rosaria Conte

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University (CEU), Hungary.;Laboratory of Agent-Based Social Simulation, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council (ISTC CNR), Italy.

  • Venue:
  • Simulation
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this work we propose a theory of gossip as a means for social control. Exercising social control roughly means to isolate and to punish cheaters. However, punishment is costly and it inevitably implies the problem of second-order cooperation. Moving from a cognitive model of gossip, we report data from ethnographic studies and agent-based simulations to support our claim that gossip reduces the costs of social control without lowering its efficacy.