Reputations can make or break citizens, communities, or companies. Reputations matter for individual careers, for one’s chances of finding a partner, for a profession’s credibility, or for the value of a firm’s stock options – to name but a few. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip – evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The present Handbook closes this gap, drawing on cutting edge insights from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and economics to philosophy, neurobiology and computer science. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current state of the art on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, modern firms, social networks, or schools. The volume is organized into seven parts, each of them devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Highly international in scope, the volume brings together some of the most eminent experts on gossip and reputation. Their contributions do not only help us to better understand the complex interplay between two of society’s most delicate social mechanisms. By pointing to new problems and a newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions, the book also sketches the contours of a long term research agenda.
Content
- Introduction: Gossip and Reputation—A Multidisciplinary Research Program
- Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek
I Disciplinary Foundations
- Gossip, Reputation, and Sustainable Cooperation: Sociological Foundations
- Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek
- Human Sociality and Psychological Foundations
- Nicholas Emler
- Reputation in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology
- Gloria Origgi
- Gossip, Reputation, and Language
- Haykaz Mangardich and Stanka A. Fitneva
- Gossip in Ethnographic Perspective
- Niko Besnier
II Individual Cognition and Emotion
- Neuroscientific Methods
- Riccardo Boero
- Gossip and Reputation in Childhood
- Gordon P. D. Ingram
- Gossip and Emotion
- Elena Martinescu, Onne Janssen, and Bernard A. Nijstad
III Strategic Interdependencies
- Gossip as a Social Skill
- Francis T. McAndrew
- Gossip and Reputation in Social Dilemmas
- Manfred Milinski
- Reputation and Gossip in Game Theory
- Charles Roddie
- Agent-Based Computational Models of Reputation and Status Dynamics
- André Grow and Andreas Flache
IV Evolution, Competition, and Gender
- Gossip and Reputation in Small-scale Societies: A View from Evolutionary Anthropology
- Christopher Boehm
- Gossip, Reputation, and Friendship in Within-group Competition: An Evolutionary Perspective
- Nicole H. Hess and Edward H. Hagen
- Women’s Gossip as an Intrasexual Competition Strategy: An Evolutionary Approach to Sex and Discrimination
- Adam Davis, Tracy Vaillancourt, Steven Arnocky, and Robert Doyel
V Power and Status
- Gossip and Reputation in the Media: How Celebrities Emerge and Evolve by Means of Mass-Mediated Gossip
- Charlotte J. S. De Backer, Hilde Van den Bulck, Maryanne L. Fisher, and Gaëlle Ouvrein
- On the Nature of Gossip, Reputation, and Power Inequality
- Sally Farley
- Gossip and Reputation in Adolescent Networks
- Dorottya Kisfalusi, Károly Takács, and Judit Pál
VI Markets, Organizations, and Networks
- Trust and Reputation in Markets
- Andreas Diekmann and Wojtek Przepiorka
- The Economics of Gossip and Collective Reputation
- Federico Boffa and Stefano Castriota
- Antecedents and Consequences of Gossip in Work Groups
- Bianca Beersma, Gerben A. van Kleef, and Maria T. M. Dijkstra
- Gossip and Reputation in Social Networks
- Lea Ellwardt
- VII The Web, Computers, and Technology
- Gossip and Reputation in Computational Systems
- Jordi Sabater-Mir
- Online Reputation Systems
- Chris Snijders and Uwe Matzat
- Gossip, Internet-Based Reputation Systems, and Governance
- Lucio Picci
- Gossip and Reputation in Computational Systems