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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

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 behavior of a heterogeneous population of individuals during an emergency, such as epidemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, is dynamic, emergent and complex. In this situation, reducing uncertainty about the event is crucial in order to identify and pursue the best possible course of action. People depend on experts, government sources, the media and fellow community members as potentially valid sources of information to reduce uncertainty, but their messages can be ambiguous, misleading or contradictory. Effective risk prevention depends on the way in which the population receives, elaborates and spread the message, and together these elements result in a collective perception of risk. The interaction between individuals' attitudes toward risk and institutions, the more or less alarmist way in which the information is reported and the role of the media can lead to risk perception that differs from the original message, as well as to contrasting opinions about risk within the same population. The aim of this study is to bridge a model of opinion dynamics with the issue of uncertainty and trust in the sources, in order to understand the determinants of collective risk assessment. Our results show that alarming information spreads more easily than reassuring one, and that the media plays a key role in this. Concerning the role of internal variables, our simulation results show that risk sensitiveness has more influence on the final opinion than trust towards the institutional message. Furthermore, the role of different network structures seemed to be negligible, even on two empirically calibrated network topologies, thus suggesting that knowing beforehand how much the public trusts their institutional representatives and how reactive they are to a certain risk might provide useful indications to design more effective communication strategies during crises.

Abstract. 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 analytics to social datasets. However, Big Data is no panacea and the data deluge that it provides raises more questions than it answers. The aim of this paper is to present an overview in which CSS will be introduced and the costs of CSS will be balanced against its benefits, in an attempt to propose an integrative view of the new and the old practice of CSS. In particular, two routes to integration will be drawn. First, it will be advocated that social data mining and computational modeling need to be integrated. Second, we will introduce the generative approach, aimed to understand how social phenomena can be generated starting from the micro-components, including psychological mechanisms, and we will discuss the necessity of combining it with the anticipatory, data-driven objective. By these means, Computational Social Science will develop into a more comprehensive field of Computational Social and Behavioral Science in which data science, ICT, as well as the behavioral and social sciences will be fruitfully integrated.

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 other actors in the gossip triad. We argue that understanding the reasons why people do not gossip may provide useful insights into individual motives, group dynamics, and collective behaviors. This theoretical contribution first critically surveys the existing gossip literature with the aim of highlighting the conditions under which people might refrain from sharing third party information. We then propose to apply Goal Framing theory as a way to bridge a theory of the micro-foundations of human behavior with an analytical model of the gossip triad that disentangles the various ways through which senders, receivers, and objects of gossip may be interrelated. From a goal framing perspective, most research on gossip illustrates the mechanisms in which the hedonic gratification derived from gossiping is reinforced by gain or normative goals. However, a normative or a gain goal frame can prevent the gossip monger from spreading the information, and we argue that depending on different configurations of frames and relations between actors the perceived costs of sending gossip may be far higher than much of the previous literature suggests.

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 other actors in the gossip triad. We argue that understanding the reasons why people do not gossip may provide useful insights into individual motives, group dynamics, and collective behaviors. This theoretical contribution first critically surveys the existing gossip literature with the aim of highlighting the conditions under which people might refrain from sharing third party information. We then propose to apply Goal Framing theory as a way to bridge a theory of the micro-foundations of human behavior with an analytical model of the gossip triad that disentangles the various ways through which senders, receivers, and objects of gossip may be interrelated. From a goal framing perspective, most research on gossip illustrates the mechanisms in which the hedonic gratification derived from gossiping is reinforced by gain or normative goals. However, a normative or a gain goal frame can prevent the gossip monger from spreading the information, and we argue that depending on different configurations of frames and relations between actors the perceived costs of sending gossip may be far higher than much of the previous literature suggests.