Psychological adaptations for assessing gossip veracity

Evolutionary models of human cooperation are increasingly emphasizing the role of reputation and the requisite truthful “gossiping ” about reputation-relevant behav-ior. If resources were allocated among individuals according to their reputations, competition for resources via competition for “good ” reputations would have cre-ated incentives for exaggerated or deceptive gossip about oneself and one’s com-petitors in ancestral societies. Correspondingly, humans should have psychological adaptations to assess gossip veracity. Using social psychological methods, we ex-plored cues of gossip veracity in four experiments. We found that simple reiteration increased gossip veracity, but only for those who found the gossip relatively uninter-esting. Multiple sources of gossip increased its veracity, as did the independence of those sources. Information that suggested alternative, benign interpretations of gos-sip decreased its veracity. Competition between a gossiper and her target decreased gossip veracity. These results provide preliminary evidence for psychological adap-tations for assessing gossip veracity, mechanisms that might be used to assess verac-ity in other domains involving social exchange of information