Gossip and Ostracism Promote Cooperation in Groups

TLDR

Cooperation is hard to sustain because individuals are incentivized to exploit others. The study investigates whether gossip-driven reputational information can foster cooperation in mixed-motive contexts. The study found that gossip about reputations led participants to preferentially cooperate with cooperative partners and ostracize selfish ones, boosting public‑good contributions and reducing exploitation, while ostracized individuals later cooperated at levels similar to non‑ostracized peers, demonstrating that gossip mitigates egoistic behavior through partner selection.

Abstract

The widespread existence of cooperation is difficult to explain because individuals face strong incentives to exploit the cooperative tendencies of others. In the research reported here, we examined how the spread of reputational information through gossip promotes cooperation in mixed-motive settings. Results showed that individuals readily communicated reputational information about others, and recipients used this information to selectively interact with cooperative individuals and ostracize those who had behaved selfishly, which enabled group members to contribute to the public good with reduced threat of exploitation. Additionally, ostracized individuals responded to exclusion by subsequently cooperating at levels comparable to those who were not ostracized. These results suggest that the spread of reputational information through gossip can mitigate egoistic behavior by facilitating partner selection, thereby helping to solve the problem of cooperation even in noniterated interactions.