Summary: A new Brown University study shows that people instinctively weigh popularity and social distance when deciding who to tell gossip. By mentally mapping their social networks, individuals can spread information widely while reducing the chance that the gossip reaches the person being discussed.
Researchers report that people form internal maps of their social circles and use those maps to predict how information, including gossip, will cascade across connections. The results reveal sophisticated, automatic computations in the brain that guide strategic sharing behavior in social networks.
Key Facts:
- People are more likely to share gossip with individuals who are popular but only loosely connected to the gossip’s target, minimizing the risk the target will learn about it.
- Mental “social maps” — cognitive representations of who knows whom — help people forecast how gossip will travel.
- The brain’s intuitive calculations mirror principles used by algorithms that amplify content on social media.
Source: Brown University
Overview
Cognitive neuroscientists at Brown University examined how people strategically share information about others who are not present. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, the team found that gossiping draws on rapid, complex computations in the brain. Most people make these calculations automatically when choosing who to tell.
The research, published in Nature Human Behaviour, defines gossip as talk about absent third parties. The study finds that people tend to avoid sharing gossip with those who are close friends of the gossip subject, especially when the subject is popular. Instead, they favor sharing with people who can amplify the information widely but remain socially distant from the target.
“We rely on two key factors when deciding who to tell: the recipient’s popularity and their social distance from the gossip’s target,” said Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown and a Carney Institute affiliate. “This strategy lets information spread broadly while reducing the chance the subject will find out.”
Alice Xia, a Ph.D. student in cognitive science and a study co-author, noted parallels between these human calculations and the mechanisms behind social media virality. Platforms use metrics such as follower counts and engagement to predict and maximize sharing, mirroring how people judge a listener’s potential to amplify content in real-world networks.
Mapping how gossip spreads
These sharing decisions depend on cognitive mapping — the brain’s ability to represent relationships among people. Previous work by FeldmanHall and Apoorva Bhandari showed that people replay social experiences during sleep to build and refine a mental map of their social world. Even when they cannot consciously list every tie, people maintain usable internal maps that guide social behavior.
In the current study, participants first learned a fictional nine-person network and then rated how likely they would be to pass along a piece of gossip to each network member. Early results demonstrated that participants consistently used social distance and popularity — operationalized as the number of direct connections a person has — to predict information flow.
The investigators then applied the approach to a real-world setting involving roughly 200 first-year Brown students living in residence halls. By surveying participants about their friendships, the team constructed an empirical social network and asked a subset to estimate the probability that one person’s news would reach another. Even in this complex, noisy network with many potential pathways, participants accurately used social distance and popularity to forecast gossip spread.
To model these abilities computationally, the researchers collaborated with Matt Nassar, an assistant professor of neuroscience. Their model shows how the brain compresses observed social interactions — for example, noticing that Mary spent time with James and James with Adam — into simplified maps that enable educated guesses about who will hear what, even across multiple steps.
FeldmanHall emphasized that these results challenge the notion of gossip as trivial chatter. “The fact that our brains perform this much mental math to keep gossip from reaching the wrong people underscores both the social power of gossip and the sophistication of human cognition,” she said.
Funding: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (award 2123469).
About this social neuroscience research news
Author: Corrie Pikul
Source: Brown University
Contact: Corrie Pikul – Brown University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip” by Oriel FeldmanHall et al. Nature Human Behaviour
Abstract
Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip
Social networks consist of numerous ties connecting many individuals, and these ties allow information — including gossip — to travel across the network. Given the vast number of possible connections, spreading information strategically is challenging: the goal is to maximize reach while minimizing the chance that the gossiped-about person learns it.
Across several experiments in artificial social networks (experiments 1–3, N = 568) the authors show that people exploit topological properties, chiefly social distance and popularity, when deciding whom to tell. In a real-world social network sample (experiment 4, N = 187), the same behavioral patterns appear, indicating the robustness of these topological cues in predicting information flow amid real-world complexity.
Computational modeling further suggests that these adaptive behaviors depend on mental representations of how information cascades through social networks, enabling people to anticipate and strategically shape where gossip will travel.