Bad Gossip Trumps Good Facts
John Tierney has a very nice description of an absolutely fascinating result,
Facts Prove No Match for Gossip, It Seems - New York Times
"Until now, I was firmly pro-gossip. I welcomed the theory that gossip was the reason language developed. I cheered on researchers who believed gossip was the great evolutionary leap that enabled human apes to live peacefully in large groups, develop moral codes, build civilizations and, eventually, sell supermarket tabloids.
Gossip also told people whom to trust, and the prospect of a bad reputation discouraged them from acting selfishly, so large groups could peacefully cooperate. At least, that was the theory: gossip promoted the “indirect reciprocity” that made human society possible.
But here’s the disconcerting news from the experiment. In a couple of rounds, each donor was given both hard facts and gossip. He was given a record of how his partner had behaved previously as well as some gossip — positive gossip in one round, negative in another.
The donor was told that the source of the gossip didn’t have any extra information beyond what the donor could already see for himself. Yet the gossip, whether positive or negative, still had a big influence on the donors’ decisions, and it didn’t even matter if the source of the gossip had a good reputation himself. On average, cooperation increased by about 20 percent if the gossip was good, and fell by 20 percent if the gossip was negative."
This is an absolutely fascinating result: when faced with direct evidence about whether a person cooperates or not, we are still influenced by "stories" of his or her cooperation.
And yet what could that gossip be based up, but a generalization of the direct evidence?
People, we are just too weird to have gone to the moon and back.
