Being in the Know Yucel, Meltem; Sjobeck, Gustav R.; Glass, Rebecca ...
Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.),
09/2021, Volume:
32, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Gossip (evaluative talk about others) is ubiquitous. Gossip allows important rules to be clarified and reinforced, and it allows individuals to keep track of their social networks while strengthening ...their bonds to the group. The purpose of this study is to decipher the nature of gossip and how it relates to friendship connections. To measure how gossip relates to friendship, participants from men’s and women’s collegiate competitive rowing (crew) teams (
N
= 44) noted their friendship connections and their tendencies to gossip about each of their teammates. Using social network analysis, we found that the crew members’ friend group connectedness significantly correlated with their positive and negative gossip network involvement. Higher connectedness among friends was associated with less involvement in spreading negative gossip and/or being a target of negative gossip. More central connectedness to the friend group was associated with more involvement in spreading positive gossip and/or being a target of positive gossip. These results suggest that the spread of both positive and negative gossip may influence and be influenced by friendship connections in a social network.
In 3 studies with student samples, we advance a social‐motivational approach to gossip. We developed the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire to distinguish negative influence, information gathering and ...validation, social enjoyment, and group protection as motives underlying gossip. Study 1 demonstrated that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and that the informational motive was the most prevalent reason to instigate gossip. Study 2 showed that group protection was especially important when the opportunity to gossip with a group member about another member's norm‐violating behavior was salient. Study 3 showed that when participants imagined someone gossiped to them about another group member's norm violation, and ascribed this to group protection, they rated the gossip as social and did not disapprove of it.
Infodemics, often including rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories, have been common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Monitoring social media data has been identified as the best method for tracking ...rumors in real time and as a possible way to dispel misinformation and reduce stigma. However, the detection, assessment, and response to rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories in real time are a challenge. Therefore, we followed and examined COVID-19-related rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories circulating on online platforms, including fact-checking agency websites, Facebook, Twitter, and online newspapers, and their impacts on public health. Information was extracted between December 31, 2019 and April 5, 2020, and descriptively analyzed. We performed a content analysis of the news articles to compare and contrast data collected from other sources. We identified 2,311 reports of rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories in 25 languages from 87 countries. Claims were related to illness, transmission and mortality (24%), control measures (21%), treatment and cure (19%), cause of disease including the origin (15%), violence (1%), and miscellaneous (20%). Of the 2,276 reports for which text ratings were available, 1,856 claims were false (82%). Misinformation fueled by rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories can have potentially serious implications on the individual and community if prioritized over evidence-based guidelines. Health agencies must track misinformation associated with the COVID-19 in real time, and engage local communities and government stakeholders to debunk misinformation.
The positive role of organizational and supervisor support for employees who are coping with being targets of negative workplace gossip has been established. However, to extend understanding of how ...external social support works in the context of workplace gossip, we investigated social support from family and friends and gender as joint moderators of the relationship between gossip and task performance of the targeted employees. A longitudinal two- wave survey research design was utilized. The sample consisted of 231 supervisor–subordinate dyads employed by five large companies in China. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted, and we uncovered a negative association between negative workplace gossip and task performance. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that external social support had an amplifying effect on the relationship between negative workplace gossip and the task performance of targeted male employees, whereas external social support had a mitigating effect for targeted female employees. This study practically guides managers to address negative workplace gossip more effectively with a consideration of gender differences, and theoretically expands understanding of the impact of social support and its interaction with gender in the context of negative workplace gossip.
Exploring a prevalent yet under-researched phenomenon in organizations, we examine the effect of multi-source negative gossip (i.e., gossip from coworkers and supervisors) on targets’ strategic ...behavioral responses. Drawing on appraisal theory of emotion, we propose that negative gossip from coworkers and supervisors interactively affect targets’ anger and shame. These discrete emotions, in turn, lead to distinct strategic behavioral responses of gossip targets: social undermining and exemplification, respectively. In Study 1, we tested our hypotheses with a three-wave, time-lagged survey among 500 Chinese employees; in Study 2, we conducted a scenario experiment with 479 international employees. Supporting our theorizing, negative gossip from coworkers was associated with stronger feelings of anger when negative gossip from supervisors was lower (vs. higher), which led to social undermining of coworkers. Negative gossip from coworkers was associated with stronger feelings of shame when negative gossip from supervisors was higher (vs. lower), which led to exemplification of socially desirable behavior. Overall, investigating the phenomenon of multi-source gossip within organizations, we document emotional and behavioral responses of targets to multi-source negative gossip and discuss their theoretical and practical implications, as well as future avenues for research.
Abstract
Gossip promotes prosocial behavior via reputational concern. However, the relative effectiveness of positive and negative gossip has been understudied. I examined to what extent positive and ...negative gossip promoted prosocial behavior when a potential consequence of gossip was positively framed (a third party offering a financial bonus) and negatively framed (a third party deducting a bonus). I found that gossip, irrespective of its valence, promoted generosity via reputational concern in both contexts. Yet, analyses suggested that positive gossip may have a stronger effect in promoting prosociality. The findings, together with previous findings, call for further investigation of the relationship between the effectiveness of positive and negative gossip in promoting prosociality and types of reputational consequences.
Machine learning over distributed data stored by many clients has important applications in use cases where data privacy is a key concern or central data storage is not an option. Recently, federated ...learning was proposed to solve this problem. The assumption is that the data itself is not collected centrally. In a master–worker architecture, the workers perform machine learning over their own data and the master merely aggregates the resulting models without seeing any raw data, not unlike the parameter server approach. Gossip learning is a decentralized alternative to federated learning that does not require an aggregation server or indeed any central component. The natural hypothesis is that gossip learning is strictly less efficient than federated learning due to relying on a more basic infrastructure: only message passing and no cloud resources. In this empirical study, we examine this hypothesis and we present a systematic comparison of the two approaches. The experimental scenarios include a real churn trace collected over mobile phones, continuous and bursty communication patterns, different network sizes and different distributions of the training data over the devices. We also evaluate a number of additional techniques including a compression technique based on sampling, and token account based flow control for gossip learning. We examine the aggregated cost of machine learning in both approaches. Surprisingly, the best gossip variants perform comparably to the best federated learning variants overall, so they offer a fully decentralized alternative to federated learning.
•Fully decentralized machine learning is a viable alternative to federated learning.•Compression is essential for all the algorithms to achieve competitive performance.•Uneven class-label distribution over the nodes favors centralization.•For bursty communication, token-based flow control improves the convergence of gossip.
How does being the target of negative supervisor gossip influence the functioning of targeted employees? We draw on feedback intervention theory to examine the beneficial and detrimental effects of ...negative supervisor gossip on targets’ feedback seeking behavior (FSB). Results from an online scenario study (N = 731) and a multi-wave field study (N = 249) showed that being the target of negative supervisor gossip led to high task reflexivity, which promoted FSB, but also led to high negative affect, which inhibited FSB. Furthermore, targets’ implicit theory of ability moderated the indirect relationships between negative supervisor gossip and FSB. Specifically, negative supervisor gossip stimulated task reflexivity and FSB especially when targets had a strong incremental theory. In contrast, negative supervisor gossip increased negative affect and stifled FSB especially when targets had a strong entity theory. Our findings indicate that negative supervisor gossip is a double-edged sword for targets’ engagement in FSB, thus providing a balanced view of its effects. We provide guidance for supervisors to better deliver and for employees to better receive different forms of feedback.
Gossip algorithms have received a lot of attention in recent years due to their ability to compute global statistics using local pair-wise communications. Simple execution, robustness to topology ...changes, and distributed nature make these algorithms more attractive to wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Periodic gossip algorithm is a special case of gossip algorithm, where neighbouring nodes gossip at every time instant. Convergence rate plays a fundamental role in effectively measuring the performance of periodic gossip algorithms. However, these algorithms are inherently iterative and estimating their convergence rate for large-scale WSNs is a computationally challenging task. Hence, to utilize the periodic gossip algorithms for sensor networks, it is necessary to study the convergence rate with less computational resources. In this work, we model the WSN as a one-dimensional lattice network and derive the closed form expressions of convergence rate for even and odd number of nodes. To realize the closed-form expressions of convergence rate, we obtain the exact formulas of eigenvalues for pentadiagonal matrices. The numerical analysis reveals the new design insights into the effect of gossip weight, network size, and probability of link failures on the performance of convergence rate. Specifically, we prove that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{w} =0.9 </tex-math></inline-formula> achieves fast convergence rate over <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{w} =0.5 </tex-math></inline-formula> for large-scale WSNs. Our theoretical results provide the basic analytical tools for controlling the performance of periodic gossip algorithms in large-scale WSNs.
Although researchers have examined the effects of negative workplace gossip on target employees' work-related behavior, it remains unclear when and how personality traits play a role between negative ...workplace gossip and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Drawing upon the transactional model of stress and coping, we posit a mediated moderation model of the effects of self-monitoring and impression management tactics on the relationship between negative workplace gossip and target employees' OCB. By collecting supervisor-subordinate dyadic time-lagged data, we demonstrated that the relationship between negative workplace gossip and OCB was weaker when employees were high self-monitors. In addition, we found that the moderating effects of self-monitoring were mediated by the use of impression management tactics.
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