Even when we know the truth, gossip still seems to influence us, according to a study in PNAS. Researchers from Germany and Austria set students a game in which they had choose whether or not to pass money between each other. To do this they were given true information on other players’ past ‘gifts’ but also gossip on their generosity or lack of it. Crucially, some of this gossip was fake.

Even when the students had access to the raw data on fellow players’ past decisions, gossip still seemed to influence them. “People only saw the gossip, not the past decisions. People really reacted on it,” study author Ralf Sommerfeld, of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology told Reuters. They gave less money to those described as ‘nasty misers’ than they did to those described as ‘generous players’, for example.

This is slightly confusing. “If you know you already have the full information about someone rationally you shouldn’t care so much what someone else says,” says Sommerfeld (NY Times). An explanation is that we may be predisposed to believe people as we can never normally access the full set of facts on anything – we are likely to have missed some information, and it may have been crucial. (Telegraph)

“We show that gossip has a strong influence on the resulting behaviour even when participants have access to the original information (i.e., direct observation) as well as gossip about the same information,” writes Somerfield in PNAS (abstract should appear here soon). “Thus, it is evident that gossip has a strong manipulative potential.”

He also found that gossip about cooperative people was more powerful than gossip about uncooperative people. Maybe we always prefer to think the best of people.

Kevin Kniffin, an anthropologist at theUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison, says things aren’t quite so simple in the real world though (Science). “It is important to recognize the presence of power differences. Since some people’s opinions are more important than others’, some people’s opinions carry more consequences than others’.”

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