Gossip improves the accuracy of social impressions by widening information samples.

Evidence

The model also showed that when agents are permitted to “gossip” with one another about thirdparty agents, impressions of the third parties became less negative, even though the communicating agents were likely to have equally negative views of the third party. This is because the opportunity to gossip with one another provided agents with a larger sample of information about the third party, which more accurately described the overall positivity of the third party. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 828

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Milgrom law-merchant reading on how institutions (gossip as informal information-sharing) substitute for costly direct information — here in social judgment rather than trade reputation. — connects to: Gossip is a distorted figure of a future passion for human particularity — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 296
• CANDY: Nice bar fact: gossip makes your judgments of people more accurate, not less — because it widens the sample beyond your own skewed interactions.