In gossip we trust

The article Multiple gossip statements and their effect on reputation and trustworthiness explains indirect reputation and trustworthiness in a simple iterated and networked Prisoner's dilemma-style game in which user may donate at a positive sum to another. The amount of gossip correlated to the level of accuracy.

I first became interested in gossip in the Army training, where it pervasive, and (as far as I was able to hear) frequently inaccurate, distorted, and more of a fantastic leap from data to conclusion. The kind of gossip I received, though, had less, I believe, to do with cooperation than with norms. I was outside the norms, because I often read books.

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