Where does gossip collide?

Informal talk among members of a group about the conduct of absent third parties, treated as a mechanism that maintains shared norms and marks who belongs. Gluckman's 1963 Gossip and scandal argued that such talk is a privilege of membership: it keeps a group's history and values alive and disciplines those who stray from them, so only insiders may gossip about insiders. Paine's 1967 What is gossip about? refined this by shifting attention from the group's cohesion to the individual gossiper's own interests. The referent here is a social practice among people, studied for its role in cohesion and reputation, and it is not a message-passing rule between computers or an evolutionary account of why humans talk at all.[1][2]

Unit

An instance of evaluative talk about an absent person

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied by ethnographic observation and analysis of who talks about whom, about what, and to what social effect

A class of communication protocol in which each node periodically picks another node at random and exchanges information with it, so an update spreads through a network the way an infection spreads through a population. Demers and colleagues' 1987 Epidemic algorithms for replicated database maintenance introduced these methods to keep many copies of a database consistent, showing that random pairwise exchange propagates changes quickly and tolerates failures without any central coordinator. The referent is an engineered rule for how machines pass messages, judged by how fast and reliably data converges, and it borrows only the name and the metaphor of spreading talk, not the human practice or the evolutionary story.[3]

Unit

One randomised exchange of state between two nodes per round

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by rounds to convergence, message overhead, and robustness to node and link failure

In this account, gossip is the everyday exchange of social information about who is doing what with whom, cast as the human replacement for the physical grooming that bonds other primates. Dunbar's 1993 Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans proposed that as human groups grew too large to hold together by grooming, language evolved to let people bond many partners at once through talk, most of it social. His 2004 Gossip in evolutionary perspective developed the claim that a large share of conversation is devoted to such social topics and that this function drove the origin of language. The referent is a proposed evolutionary function of human talk, argued from group size and brain size, and it is distinct from the anthropologist's practice of policing norms and from a computer's message-passing rule.[4][5]

Unit

A share of conversation devoted to social information about others

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Examined by sampling conversation topics and by comparing group size against relative neocortex size across primates