Ironic effects of prosocial gossip in driving inaccurate social perceptions

IF 3.2 2区 心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL
Samantha Grayson , Matthew Feinberg , Robb Willer , Jamil Zaki
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Abstract

Gossip is often stereotyped as a frivolous social activity, but in fact can be a powerful tool for discouraging selfishness and cheating. In economic games, gossip induces people to act more cooperatively, presumably to avoid the cost of accruing a negative reputation. Might even this prosocial sort of gossip carry negative side effects? We propose that gossip might protect communities while simultaneously giving people the wrong idea about who's in them. Specifically, gossipers might disproportionately share information about cheaters in their midst, driving cynical perceptions among receivers of that gossip. To test these predictions, we first reanalyzed data from a prior study in which people played a public goods game and could gossip about their fellow players. These participants indeed produced negatively skewed gossip: writing much more frequently about cheaters than cooperators, even when most people in their public goods game groups acted generously. To examine the effect of this gossip on cynicism, we ran a new experiment in which a second generation of participants read these gossip notes, and then prepared to play their own public goods game. Gossip recipients inferred that the groups that produced these notes acted significantly more selfishly than they truly had–becoming both cynical and inaccurate based on gossip. However, this gossip did not affect second generation participants' forecasts of how their own group would behave, nor their own cooperative choices. Together, these findings suggest that gossip skews negative, and, therefore, encourages outside observers to draw more cynical conclusions about groups from which it comes.
亲社会流言在推动不准确社会认知方面的讽刺效应
流言蜚语通常被认为是一种无聊的社交活动,但事实上,它可以成为阻止自私和欺骗行为的有力工具。在经济博弈中,流言会促使人们采取更多的合作行动,这大概是为了避免因积累负面声誉而付出代价。即使是这种亲社会的流言也会带来负面影响吗?我们认为,流言蜚语在保护社区的同时,也会让人们对社区中的人产生错误的认识。具体来说,八卦者可能会不成比例地分享他们中间作弊者的信息,从而使八卦接收者产生愤世嫉俗的看法。为了验证这些预测,我们首先重新分析了之前一项研究的数据,在这项研究中,人们玩的是公共物品游戏,可以对同伴说三道四。这些参与者确实产生了负面的流言蜚语:即使在他们的公共物品游戏小组中大多数人都表现得很慷慨,他们写关于作弊者的流言蜚语也比写关于合作者的流言蜚语要多得多。为了研究这些流言蜚语对愤世嫉俗情绪的影响,我们做了一个新的实验,让第二代参与者阅读这些流言蜚语,然后准备玩他们自己的公益游戏。接受流言蜚语的人推断出,制作这些流言蜚语的团体的行为比他们真正的行为要自私得多--根据流言蜚语,他们变得既愤世嫉俗又不准确。然而,这些流言蜚语并没有影响第二代参与者对自己群体行为的预测,也没有影响他们自己的合作选择。总之,这些发现表明,流言偏向负面,因此会鼓励外部观察者对流言所产生的群体做出更多愤世嫉俗的结论。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
6.30
自引率
2.90%
发文量
134
期刊介绍: The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology publishes original research and theory on human social behavior and related phenomena. The journal emphasizes empirical, conceptually based research that advances an understanding of important social psychological processes. The journal also publishes literature reviews, theoretical analyses, and methodological comments.
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