SECRETS DO MAKE FRIENDS Psychologist Luke Chang ’02 spills the beans about the hidden power of gossip. BY BEN READ ’21
Gossip enjoys a reputation that, is shall we say, less than savory. From the tidbits of Tacitus to the scandal sheets of the Victorian era to anonymous apps like Yik Yak, gossip has been used to spread disinformation, undermine enemies, and perpetuate stereotypes. But gossip is more than trash talk, according to Dartmouth psychologist Luke Chang ’02. This ubiquitous behavior can also be prosocial, promoting vicarious learning and strengthening social connection. Gossip is an easy way to find people who are like you or share your worldview, Chang says. This can lead to what psychologists call groupthink or what sociologists call homophily—in which you find yourself exchanging opinions and beliefs with people who already think the way you do. “Bias propagates,” he says. But gossip is also a way of keeping up to date on each other’s lives and learning about our networks. Gossip helps us stay connected to our coworkers, our friends, and our family, and it can even help groups of people organize. Gossip can also help us form new relationships through the trust built from disclosing information. Chang, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, studies altruistic behavior—why people sometimes do good things, even when it’s not in their own interest. Gossip is one piece of the puzzle. “People talk,” he says. That back channel shapes perceptions of
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reputation, trustworthiness, and social dynamics—subjects that many psychologists have considered too difficult to study. Which is exactly what drew Chang to the field in the first place. “I like topics that are really interesting to think about and work on, but that a lot of people don’t think you can study scientifically,” he says. Chang and his collaborator Eshin Jolly designed a new experimental paradigm by adapting a “public goods” game—a model typically used in behavioral economics—to see how gossip would affect participants’ decisions to contribute to the public good. In a public goods game, each participant begins with a certain amount of wealth. They can then decide whether to contribute a portion of this wealth to the collective pot, which is then multiplied and divided among all participants evenly. Everyone eats. However, if a participant hoards their wealth, they will still receive their share of the pot, incentivizing selfish behavior—at the expense of the common good. In a traditional paradigm, cooperation between participants tends to unravel after a few rounds. But the advent of gossip can transform the social dynamic. Chang and Jolly created an experimental condition in which participants in a six-person group could view their neighbors’ actions and communicate with other participants who could view their neighbors’ actions. In this condition, gossip prevented the game from devolving into selfish hoarding. Instead, participants developed connections to their neighbors and acquired knowledge
about other players that was impossible to observe directly. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the authors concluded that “social information acquired through gossip aids in vicarious learning, directly influencing future behavior and impression formation.” For Chang, this demonstrated how we learn what is socially acceptable and how to be a part of a community. Gossip can “prevent the unraveling,” he says. The experiment made headlines around the globe, from the New York Times to the South China Morning Post. Which Chang finds more than somewhat ironic. As a student at Reed, he sometimes struggled. “I think everybody, including me, was surprised that I ended up as a professor in psychology.”
