This article describes the data reported in the paper “Being in the know: Social network analysis of gossip and friendship on college campuses” (Yucel et al. 2021). Data were collected from a Men's ...and Women's collegiate crew team members from a small liberal arts college. Participants (N = 44) reported information about how often they gossip about members of the team (positively, negatively), who they have had hooked-up with on the team, who they consider to be friends with on the team, whether they have to sabotaged or been sabotaged by any teammates, their well-being and feelings of loneliness. This data brief provides detailed information about data preparation and participants responses to all survey items.
Despite decades of research from other academic fields arguing that gossip is an important and potentially functional behavior, organizational research has largely assumed that gossip is malicious ...talk. This has resulted in the proliferation of gossip items in deviance scales, effectively subsuming workplace gossip research into deviance research. In this paper, the authors argue that organizational research has traditionally considered only a very narrow subset of workplace gossip, focusing almost exclusively on extreme negative cases which are not reflective of typical workplace gossip behavior. Instead of being primarily malicious, typical workplace gossip can be either positive or negative in nature and may serve important functions. It is therefore recommended that workplace gossip be studied on its own, independent of deviance. To facilitate this, the authors reconceptualize the workplace gossip construct and then develop a series of general-purpose English- and Chinese-language workplace gossip scales. Using 8 samples (including qualitative, multisource, multiwave, and multicultural data), the authors demonstrate the construct validity, reliability, cross-cultural measurement invariance, and acceptable psychometric properties of the workplace gossip scales. Relationships are demonstrated between workplace gossip and a variety of other organizational variables and processes, including uncertainty, emotion validation, self-esteem, norm enforcement, networking, influence, organizational justice, performance, deviance, and turnover. Future directions in workplace gossip research are discussed.
This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of ...organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically.
This article is concerned with developing a novel distributed Kalman filtering algorithm over wireless sensor networks based on randomized consensus strategy. Compared with centralized algorithm, ...distributed filtering techniques require less computation per sensor and lead to more robust estimation since they simply use the information from the neighboring nodes in the network. However, poor local sensor estimation caused by limited observability and network topology changes, which interfere the global consensus, are challenging issues. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel randomized gossip based distributed Kalman filtering algorithm. Information exchange and computation in the proposed algorithm can be carried out in an arbitrarily connected network of sensors. In addition, the computational burden can be distributed for a sensor, which communicates with a stochastically selected neighbor at each clock step under schemes of gossip algorithm. In this case, the error covariance matrix changes stochastically at every clock step; thus, the convergence is considered in a probabilistic sense. We provide the mean square convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm. Under a sufficient condition, we show that the proposed algorithm is quite appealing as it achieves better mean square error performance theoretically than the noncooperative decentralized Kalman filtering algorithm. Examples and simulations are provided to illustrate the theoretical results.
Workplace gossip is generally viewed as a deviant behavior that negatively affects the work outcomes of employees. However, we argue that this negative view is incomplete. Drawing on the cultural ...learning perspective of gossip and social learning theory, we examine how the job performance of employee receivers benefits from supervisor negative gossip through reflective learning. On the basis of multi-source, cross-sectional designs, Studies 1 and 2 consistently find that supervisor negative gossip facilitates employee receiver reflective learning and subsequent job performance when controlling for two sets of theory-relevant variables. Study 3, which has a multi-source, cross-lagged panel design, provides further evidence of the directional relationship from supervisor negative gossip to employee receiver job performance through reflective learning. The findings of the three separate field studies support the positive effect of supervisor negative gossip on employee receivers from a learning perspective. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings in terms of how employee receiver job performance can benefit from workplace negative gossip.
The phenomenon of gossip, broadly defined as the evaluative and/or informative talk about absent third parties, has been one of the most commonly used forms of talk since the very beginning of the ...human interaction; and accordingly has been studied from various schools of research such as sociology, psychology, linguistics, religious studies etc. (Gluckman, 1963; Fine & Rosnow, 1978; Bergmann, 1993; Foster, 2004). However, the sequential organisation of gossip talk, and the topics of gossip still remain underexplored. This study aims to investigate this underexplored phenomenon with an emic perspective in an old people’s home in Turkey, where the body of research on gossip so far is limited to quantitative questionnaire data or participant perception based interview data. This PhD thesis adopts an Ethnomethodological approach, and the analysis draws on Sack’s Conversation Analysis, to shed a light on 1) the sequential organisation and 2) the topics of gossip at a micro-analytic level. From a total of 92 evaluative gossip extracts of different lengths analysed for this study, 28 are presented in this thesis. The results of the analysis add to the existent literature on two levels; the first one is sequential analysis of gossip, and the second is contextual elements present in gossip sequences. The results of the sequential analysis indicate that gossipers apply specific ways to introducing gossip, the gossip hearers have similar strategies to respond to the gossip initiation, and finally there is a systematicity in gossip endings. The second, contextual side, draws the attention to the ways in which elderly interact non-institutionally in this institutional context, and how they place themselves as experts in the society by the aid of their active use of language (i.e. gossip), by focusing on topics of gossip, gossip as an element of appraisal, gossip as a connection tool, teacher’s fluid identity, use of proverbs, and the existence of religion-morality in gossip talk.
Gossip harms power. Across 6 pre-registered primary studies and 7 pre-registered supplemental studies, we demonstrate that a reputation for engaging in negative gossip (sharing negatively-valanced ...information about an absent target) reduces expert power (power derived from being regarded as a superior source of expertise). A reputation for engaging in negative gossip harms expert power in two ways: (1) it reduces the likelihood that others will ask experts for advice, even when experts are clearly competent, and (2) it harms perceptions of the experts' competence. We also find that reputations for general, neutral, and sometimes even positive gossip reduce the likelihood that experts are asked for advice. Our results advance our understanding of who gains power in organizations and highlight an important cost of gossip for both individuals and their organizations. Our findings also underscore the important relationship between advice and power. Whether or not and from whom individuals seek advice determines who is accorded power.
False rumors (often termed "fake news") on social media pose a significant threat to modern societies. However, potential reasons for the widespread diffusion of false rumors have been underexplored. ...In this work, we analyze whether sentiment words, as well as different emotional words, in social media content explain differences in the spread of true vs. false rumors. For this purpose, we collected Formula: see text rumor cascades from Twitter, comprising more than 4.5 million retweets that have been fact-checked for veracity. We then categorized the language in social media content to (1) sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative) and (2) eight basic emotions (i. e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, trust, sadness, and surprise). We find that sentiment and basic emotions explain differences in the structural properties of true vs. false rumor cascades. False rumors (as compared to true rumors) are more likely to go viral if they convey a higher proportion of terms associated with a positive sentiment. Further, false rumors are viral when embedding emotional words classified as trust, anticipation, or anger. All else being equal, false rumors conveying one standard deviation more positive sentiment have a 37.58% longer lifetime and reach 61.44% more users. Our findings offer insights into how true vs. false rumors spread and highlight the importance of managing emotions in social media content.
The spreading of misinformation online Del Vicario, Michela; Bessi, Alessandro; Zollo, Fabiana ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2016, Volume:
113, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The wide availability of user-provided content in online socialmedia facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also ...allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15—where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.
Purpose
The crucial role of knowledge sharing in an organization has become even more crucial lately, resulting in garnering more attention by scholars. In reality, while several organizations expect ...their employees to share knowledge with colleagues actively, many choose to hide their knowledge when asked for help. This study aims to explore whether negative workplace gossip (NWG) affects employee knowledge hiding (KH), as well as analyzes whether relational identification (RI) and interpersonal trust (IT) play a chain mediating role between the two, and discusses whether forgiveness climate (FC) could be used as a boundary condition in the relationships mentioned above.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the conservation of resource (COR) theory and the cognitive–affective personality system (CAPS) theory, the authors surveyed 326 employees in China at 2 time-points and explored the correlation between NWG and KH, as well as the underlying mechanism. Using confirmatory factor analysis, bootstrapping method and structural equation model, the authors validated the research hypotheses.
Findings
The findings revealed the following: NWG negatively correlates with KH; RI and IT play a mediation role between NWG and KH, respectively, and both variables also play a chain mediation role in the relationship mentioned above; and FC moderates the negative impact of NWG on RI, further moderating the chain mediation between RI and IT and between NWG and KH.
Originality/value
First, this study established the correlation between NWG and KH, as well as analyzed the internal mechanism between the two. Besides, this study adds to scholars’ understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which these effects could occur. Second, this study demonstrated the moderating effect of FC – a situational feature that has been neglected in previous studies. Furthermore, this study can not only complement the situational factors ignored in previous studies but also broaden the application scope of CAPS. Finally, this study effectively combines COR and CAPS, which provides a basis for the application of these two theories in the future.
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