The Oxford Handbook Of Gossip And Reputation

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.

Reputations can make or break citizens, communities, or companies. Reputations matter for individual careers, for one's chances of finding a partner, for a profession's credibility, or for the value of a firm's stock options - to name but a few. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The present Handbook closes this gap, drawing on cutting edge insights from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and economics to philosophy, neurobiology and computer science.

The Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Competition reviews and organizes the literature on the psychology of competition and brings together leading researchers studying competition across the field of psychology. This volume is a crucial interdisciplinary investigation into the variety of perspectives and approaches to the psychology of competition, facilitating new research and integration in the field.

Gossiping and its reputation effects are viewed as the most powerful mechanism to sustain cooperation without the intervention of formal authorities. Being virtually costless, gossiping is highly effective in monitoring and sanctioning norm violators. Rational individuals cooperate in order to avoid negative reputations. But this narrative is incomplete and often leads to wrong predictions. Goal Framing Theory, a cognitive-behavioral approach anchored in evolutionary research, provides a better explanatory framework. Three overarching goal frames (hedonic, gain, and normative) constantly compete for being in our cognitive foreground. This Element argues that for gossip to have reputation effects, a salient normative goal frame is required. But since the hedonic mindset usually trumps gain and normative concerns, most gossip will be driven by hedonic motives and therefore not have strong reputation effects. Propositions on cultural, structural, dispositional, situational, and technological gossip antecedents and consequences are developed and illustrated with evidence from the empirical record.

The premise of this book is that research into gossip, organization, and work is an important idea whose time has come. A key feature of the book is the inclusion of ‘practice points’ showing how – and where – theory and/or research intersect with practice and vice versa. They are intended as signposts to future thinking and theorizing, tempting readers to venture outside of their ‘home’ disciplines and territories, conceptual comfort zones, and methodological mindsets. The overall aim of the book is to: (i) provide enough information for readers to decide where they might want to go next; (ii) offer some theoretical directions and ethical principles; and (iii) make suggestions regarding what academic-practitioner tools and techniques will help them along the way, including arts-based and mixed-methods research that focuses on real-world lived experience(s) of gossip. It will be relevant to researchers at all stages of their career: from students at the start of their academic journey, to ‘seasoned’ scholars with more extensive experience. The book is also intended to be readable and relevant to practitioners with academic interests, who seek to reflect critically upon, and develop, their practice in times of turbulence and change and in the COVID-19 era.

In this Handbook, Laith Al-Shawaf and Todd K. Shackelford have gathered a group of leading scholars in the field to present a centralized resource for researchers and students wishing to understand emotions from an evolutionary perspective. Experts from a number of different disciplines, including psychology, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and others, tackle a variety of "how" (proximate) and "why" (ultimate) questions about the function of emotions in humans and nonhuman animals, how emotions work, and their place in human life. Comprehensive and integrative in nature, this Handbook is an essential resource for students and scholars from a diversity of fields wishing to build upon their theoretical and empirical understanding of the emotions.

The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.

The problem of cooperation is one of the core issues in sociology and social science more in general. The key question is how humans, groups, organizations, institutions, and countries can avoid or overcome the collective good dilemmas that could lead to a Hobbesian "war of all against all". The chapters in this book provide state of the art examples of research on this crucial topic. These include theoretical, laboratory, and field studies on trust and cooperation, thereby approaching the issue in three complementary and synergetic ways. The theoretical work covers articles on trust and control, reputation formation, and paradigmatic articles on the benefits and caveats of abstracting reality into models. The laboratory studies test the implications of different models of trust and reputation, such as the effects of social and institutional embeddedness and the potentially emerging inequalities this may cause. The field studies test these implications in applied settings such as business purchasing and supply, informal care, and different kinds of collaboration networks. This book is exemplary for rigorous social science. The focus is on effects of social conditions, in particular different forms of social and institutional embeddedness, on social outcomes at the macro level. Modelling efforts are applied to connect social conditions to social outcomes through micro-level behavior in ways that are easily overlooked when argumentation is intuitive and impressionistic. The book sets forth a mixed-method approach by applying different empirical methods to test hypotheses about similar questions. Several contributions re-evaluate the theoretical strengths and weaknesses following from the laboratory and field studies. Improving the theory in light of these findings facilitates pushing the boundaries of social science .