Francesca Giardini

University of Groningen | RUG · Theoretical Sociology/ ICS

Gossip is a pervasive phenomenon in organizations causing many individuals to have second-hand information about their colleagues. However, whether it is used to inform friendship choices (i.e., friendship creation, friendship maintenance, friendship discontinuation) is not that evident. This paper articulates and empirically tests a complex contag...

Research in various disciplines has highlighted that humans are uniquely able to solve the problem of cooperation through the informal mechanisms of reputation and gossip. Reputation coordinates the evaluative judgments of individuals about one another. Direct observation of actions and communication are the essential routes that are used to establ...

Natural disasters put an enormous strain on civic capital, which can result in a decrease in trust and cooperation in the affected communities. However, the existing level of civic capital can buffer the effects of the disaster, determining completely different dynamics even in neighboring regions. In order to investigate the determinants of long-t...

Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation is challenging to explain in a world of self-interested individuals. There is overwhelming empirical evidence from different disciplines that reputation and gossip promote cooperation in humans in different contexts. Despite decades of research, import...

Reputation is a fundamental feature of human sociality as it sustains cooperative relationships among unrelated individuals. Research from various disciplines provides insights on how individuals form impressions of others, condition their behaviours based on the reputation of their interacting partners and spread or learn such reputations. However...

When there is an opportunity to gain a positive reputation, individuals are more willing to sacrifice their immediate self-interest. Partner choice creates opportunities for competitive altruism, i.e. individuals compete to be regarded as more generous and to be chosen for future partnerships. Tests of the competitive altruism hypothesis have focus...

Social dilemmas are interdependent decisions where the outcomes depend upon choices made by every decision maker. Importantly, the incentive structure sets up a dominant strategy of non-cooperation such that everyone ends up worse off than if all had cooperated, but each individual is better off not cooperating regardless of what others do. Thus, s...

Social dilemmas are interdependent decisions where the outcomes depend upon choices made by every decision maker. Importantly, the incentive structure sets up a dominant strategy of non-cooperation such that everyone ends up worse off than if all had cooperated, but each individual is better off not cooperating regardless of what others do. Thus, s...

Complex contagion theory is used to develop novel hypotheses on the effects of workplace gossip on expressive relations. It is argued that hearing gossip from multiple senders or about multiple targets impacts receivers’ friendships with gossip targets. Hypotheses are tested in a two-wave sociometric panel study among 148 employees of three units i...

Reputation is a fundamental feature of human sociality as it sustains cooperative relations among unrelated individuals. Research from various disciplines provides insights on how individuals form impressions of others, condition their behaviors based on the reputation of their interacting partners, and spread or learn such reputations. However, pa...

Reputation effects are crucial for social life. There has been important work done in the social sciences on this topic and Raub's contribution has been widely recognized. It builds on Granovetter's seminal work on embeddedness. However, Raub's contribution is unnecessarily limited by the fact that he copied Granovetter's error by assuming that all...

The covid-19 pandemic has strained organizational systems, with the health care field particularly affected given sudden surges of demand and changes of policy. The pandemic showcases the need to understand how social systems can be resilient to such external shocks. Drawing on ‘joint production motivation' theory, this article offers a theoretical...

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a dramatic loss of lives worldwide, challenging the sustainability of our health care systems, threatening economic meltdown, and putting pressure on the mental health of individuals (due to social distancing and lock-down measures). The pandemic is also posing severe challenges to the scientific community, with sch...

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 goss...

Most of the current literature on gossip describes gossipmongers as incessantly sharing evaluative and valuable information about an absent third party in teams, groups, communities, and organizations. However, potential gossipers can similarly decide not to share what they know, depending on the content, the context, or their relationship with the...

Information sharing can be regarded as a form of cooperative behavior protected by the work of a reputation system. Yet, deception in communication is common. The research examined the possibility that speakers use epistemic markers to preempt being seen as uncooperative even though they in fact are. Epistemic markers convey the speakers’ certainty...

Effect of resource availability and relationship on content presentation based on GEE analyses. (DOCX)

Four scenarios were used in English and Italian. Only the Daycare scenario was used in Estonian and Turkish. The scenarios were distributed into four lists according to a Latin Square design for English and Italian participant. (DOCX)

Proportion of answers with true content by resource availability and relationship with addressee. (DOCX)

Reputation, the germ of gossip, is addressed in this chapter as a distributed instrument for social order. In literature, reputation is shown to promote (a) social control in cooperative contexts—like social groups and subgroups—and (b) partner selection in competitive ones, like (e-) markets and industrial districts. Current technology that affect...

Cooperation can be supported by indirect reciprocity via reputation. Thanks to gossip, reputations are built and circulated and humans can identify defectors and ostracise them. However, the evolutionary stability of gossip is allegedly undermined by the fact that it is more error-prone that direct observation, whereas ostracism could be ineffectiv...

Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equate reputation with a transparent and complete history of players' past decisions, in real life, reputations are often based on personal evaluations, and so they are often ambiguous...

We present a cognitive model of opinion dynamics which studies the behavior of a population of interacting individuals in the context of risk of natural disaster. In particular, we investigate the response of the individuals to the information received by institutional sources about the correct behaviors for prevention and harm reduction. The resul...

There are several mechanisms in human societies that help supporting cooperation. Gossiping, for instance, allows to identify defectors who can then be punished via ostracism. However, the evolutionary stability of gossip might be undermined by the fact that it is more error-prone that direct observation, whereas ostracism could be ineffective if t...

In the last few years, the study of social phenomena has hosted a renewal of interest in Computational Social Science (CSS). While this field is not new - Axelrod's first computational work on the evolution of cooperation goes back to 1981 - CSS has recently resurged under the pressure of quantitative social science and the application of Big Data...

In dyadic models of indirect reciprocity, the receivers’ history of giving has a significant impact on the donor’s decision. When the interaction involves more than two agents things become more complicated, and in large groups cooperation can hardly emerge. In this work we use a Public Goods Game to investigate whether publicly available reputatio...

In this paper we present participatory and experimental research aimed to test the effect of moral fines on normative competence in children. Children have been involved in a participatory experience in their neighborhood and asked to (morally) sanction cars parking on pedestrian areas (crosswalk and sidewalk). The participation of children in prom...

Reputation is one of the most effective solutions to the so-called "puzzle of cooperation≫, but it is usually studied in contexts in which information is not ambiguous and there are no incentives towards strategically using it. In this study, we test wheter the possibility of being evaluated (with a like or a dislike) when giving suggestions about...

The study of opinions—e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society—by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology and complexity science. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories, several...

We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen prosocial distribution. The chosen distribution is a means to fulfil one’s partner’s expectations. We review the economic experiments...

The study of opinions - e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society - by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology and complexity science. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories, seve...

Revenge can be conceptualized as an attempt to restore the power balance destroyed by an aggression. It can be risky and costly for the individuals, and it can become completely disruptive at the social and societal level. At the individual level, revenge implies the risk of a counterattack, either coming from the target or from his or her kin and...

In dyadic models of indirect reciprocity, the receivers' history of giving has a significant impact on the donor's decision. When the interaction involves more than two agents things become more complicated, and in large groups cooperation can hardly emerge. In this work we use a Public Goods Game to investigate whether publicly available reputatio...

In an environment in which free-riders are better off than cooperators, social control is required to foster and maintain cooperation. There are two main paths through which social control can be applied: punishment and reputation. Using a Public Goods Game, we show that gossip, used for assortment under three different strategies, can be effective...

In an environment in which free-riders are better off than cooperators, social control is required to foster and maintain coopera-tion. There are two main paths through which social control can be ap-plied: punishment and reputation. Our experiments explore the efficacy of punishment and reputation on cooperation rates, both in isolation and in com...

In an environment in which free-riders are better off than cooperators, social control is required to foster and maintain coopera-tion. There are two main paths through which social control can be ap-plied: punishment and reputation. Our experiments explore the efficacy of punishment and reputation on cooperation rates, both in isolation and in com...

In this preliminary study we examine whether and how people cooperate in a special kind of memory game where exchange of messages containing relevant infor- mation about the game was allowed. We explore the role of communication not as an external device of the game, but as the mean of coordination. We hypothesize that people cooperate until their...

Why Read This Chapter? To understand the different conceptions underlying reputation in simulations up to the current time and to get to know some of the approaches to implementing reputation mechanisms, which are more cognitively sophisticated. Abstract In this chapter, the role of reputation as a distributed instrument for social order is address...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2012, held in Valencia, Spain, in June 2012. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 35 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling social interactions...

In this work we propose a theory of gossip as a means for social control. Exercising social control roughly means to isolate and to punish cheaters. However, punishment is costly and it inevitably implies the problem of second-order cooperation. Moving from a cognitive model of gossip, we report data from ethnographic studies and agent-based simula...

Spreading information about the members of one’s group is one of the most universal human behaviors. Thanks to gossip, individuals can acquire the information about their peers without sustaining the burden of costly interactions with cheaters, but they can also create and revise social bonds. Gossip has also several positive functions at the group...

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories in both fields, several key questions still remain unanswered. The...

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, as computer science and complexity, have addressed this challenge. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories in both fields, several key questions still remain unanswered. The aim of...

People use sanctioning behaviours differently according to what they believe and want to achieve, according to the context and to the situation. We need to under-stand the motivations for different forms of punishment in order to explain why sanctions and incentives have different effects on human behaviour. Aim of this work is to propose a cogniti...

Industrial districts (Ids) can be conceived as complex systems made of heterogeneous but strictly interrelated and complementary firms that interact in a non-linear way. One of the distinctive features of industrial districts is the tight connection existing between the social community and the firms: in this context, economic exchanges are mainly...

In this work we try to draw an interdisciplinary framework aimed to integrate a socio-cognitive approach with organizational research about industrial clusters, in order to investigate whether and how social evaluations may affect clusters’ dynamics. Industrial districts are sort of “small-worlds” that provide a suitable environment for testing the...

Most people hold unrealistic positive beliefs about their personal skills, their knowledge (Fischoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1977), and their possibilities to overcome the performance of other individuals (Weinstein, 1980). This general tendency, called overconfidence, is a stable and pervasive finding both in many real-life domains and in several...

In the decision-making and rationality research field, rational decision theory (RDT) has always been the main framework, thanks to the elegance and complexity of its mathematical tools. Unfortunately, the formal refinement of the theory is not accompanied by a satisfying predictive accuracy, thus there is a big gap between what is predicted by the...

In Human-Robot Interaction domain many solutions have been proposed in order to achieve a smooth and natural communication and interaction: speech and other kinds of language, as well as others human typical ways of communication, such as gestures and facial expressions. We argue that a very necessary and effective way of improving HRI, at least fr...

The goal of this paper is to show the normative component of a convention adopted by a population of cognitive agents. To address this aim we will defend two distinct thesis. The former is that even simple predictions developed to anticipate future state of affairs have an intrinsic tendency to evolve in full expectations and then in prescriptions....

People use sanctioning behaviours differently according to what they believe and want to achieve, according to the context and to the situation. We need to under-stand the motivations for different forms of punishment in order to explain why sanctions and incentives have different effects on human behaviour. Aim of this work is to propose a cogniti...

In social groups, individuals usually exchange infor-mation about their peers' actions, behaviors and attitudes. This ex-change of information allows individuals to make more accurate and complete evaluations of other people; on the other hand, knowing facts about potential partners is pivotal to the establishment of new social links. In this work,...

"The aim of this work is to enlighten the role of cognitive influencing in norm emergence and compliance. The paper unfolds as follows: in the first part, norm immergence will be described as a necessary mechanism for norm emergence; in the second part, a cognitive analysis of punishment will be provided and the role of this enforcement mechanisms...