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Posts Tagged ‘team’

More Benefits of Gossip

Last week’s podcast, “Everybody Gossips (and That’s a Good Thing),” was all about the functions of gossip — good and bad. A new study (abstract; PDF) by Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer, and Michael Schultz looks at how gossip influences group cooperation. The researchers played a game with 216 participants, with groups investing in public goods. Participants were allowed to gossip in between rounds and exclude a participant from future rounds, if they chose. They found, as Nicholas DiFonzo said on our podcast, that gossip is great for policing and reforming selfish free riders. From The Telegraph:

Dr Matthew Feinberg, a researcher at Stanford University in the United State who co-wrote the study, said: “Groups that allow their members to gossip sustain co-operation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

“And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members.”

The researchers found that when people learn about the behavior of others through gossip, they use the information to ally themselves with those deemed co-operative.


Women, Men, and Cooperation

Women are not men, as we firmly established in a podcast earlier this year.  A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by economists Peter J. Kuhn and Marie-Claire Villeval suggests one more difference between the sexes — women may be more drawn to cooperation. Here’s the abstract:

We conduct a real-effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team-based pay. In contrast to tournaments, which are often avoided by women, we find that women choose team-based pay at least as frequently as men in all our treatments and conditions, and significantly more often than men in a well-defined subset of those cases. Key factors explaining gender patterns in attraction to co-operative incentives across experimental conditions include women’s more optimistic assessments of their prospective teammate’s ability and men’s greater responsiveness to efficiency gains associated with team production. Women also respond differently to alternative rules for team formation in a manner that is consistent with stronger inequity aversion.