Francesca Giardini | University of Groningen (original) (raw)

Papers by Francesca Giardini

The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation, 2019

Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroying coo... more Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroying cooperation. The reason seems straightforward: gossip can make or break someone’s reputation. This chapter puts this standard reputational model to closer scrutiny. It argues that there are at least three other models to consider, and it presents an analytical framework to disentangle similarities and differences between these models. Explicating all three roles in the gossip triad, it allows to distinguish (a) individual motives behind gossiping, (b) its reputation effects on the actors, (c) the impact of gossip and reputation on the quality and sustainability of cooperation, and (d) the role of the context. Applying the framework reveals a deep divide between reputation and punishment models propagated by experimental economics and evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and coalition and control models informed by sociology, on the other hand. The chapter discusses implications for a s...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021

Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation... more 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, important details of reputation systems are still unclear. Our goal with this theme issue is to promote an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to explore and understand the evolution and maintenance of reputation systems with a special emphasis on gossip and honest signalling. The theme issue is organized around four main questions: What are the necessary conditions for reputation-based systems? What is the content and context of reputation systems? How can reputations promote cooperation? And, what is the role of gossip in maintaining reputation systems and thus cooperation? This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of coopera...

European Societies, 2020

ABSTRACT The covid-19 pandemic has strained organizational systems, with the health care field pa... more ABSTRACT 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 framework linking a social system’s resilience with individual behavior. We examine a population strongly affected by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic: nursing students participating in internship programs before and during the crisis. Of the 141 nursing students in our sample, 23% opted to continue their internship. Four characteristics of work teams (collaborative contact, shared understanding, task interdependence, and collaborative organizational cultures) are hypothesized to explain students’ continued occupational commitment during the crisis. Results from binomial logistic regression analyses show task interdependence and intrinsic motivation positively affect the decision for continued participation in internship programs during the pandemic.

The goal of this paper is to show the normative component of a convention adopted by a population... more 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. We consider this as a multilevel phenomenon occurring either at the individual psychological level or at the interpersonal one or, finally, at the collective macro social level. The latter thesis is that we consider this tendency as one of the possible paths of the spontaneous emergence of agents' commitments, of conventions and likely of real social norms: the tacit emergence of a prescriptive character and, then, of obligations and duties. We will examine the constitutive elements-both cognitive and relational-of this process of spontaneous transition from the predictive attitudes to the prescriptive ones and, on this basis, to real...

We present a cognitive model of opinion dynamics which studies the behavior of a population of in... more 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 results of our study show that alarmist opinions are more likely to be adopted by populations, since worried people

In this work, we propose an evolutionary account of reactions to a wrong as an integrated set. Un... more In this work, we propose an evolutionary account of reactions to a wrong as an integrated set. Unlike other theories, we are not interested in revenge, punishment or sanction per se, but in their coexistence. We posit that this variety of reactions is needed in order to achieve different goals, but it also implies an increase in cognitive costs that requires to be explained from an evolutionary perspective. Moving from the identification of the psychological traits that uniquely define each reaction, two concurrent hypotheses are suggested and discussed: either the richness of human social life requests a variety of reactions, or the benefits of single reactions at the psychological level allowed these reactions to be maintained in the social life.

Cooperation can be supported by indirect reciprocity via reputation.Thanks to gossip, reputations... more 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 ineffective if the partner selection mechanism is not robust. The aim of this work is to investigate the conditions under which the combination of gossip and ostracism might support cooperation in groups of different sizes. We are also interested in exploring the extent to which errors in transmission might undermine the reliability of gossip as a mechanism for identifying defectors. Our results show that a large quantity of gossip is necessary to support cooperation, and that group structure can mitigate the effects of errors in transmission.

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021

People use sanctioning behaviours differently according to what they believe and want to achieve,... more 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 understand 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 cognitive model of three distinct kinds of punishing behaviours, differentiated in terms of the defining cognitive patterns.

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by soc... more 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 this paper is to challenge the current theories on opinion by putting forward a cognitively grounded model where opinions are described as specific mental representations whose main properties are put forward. A comparison with reputation will be also presented.

reputation in simulations up to the current time and to get to know some of the approaches to imp... more 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 addressed. A short review of the state of the art will show the role of reputation in promoting (a) social control in cooperative contexts – like social groups and subgroups – and (b) partner selection in competitive contexts, like (e-) markets and industrial districts. In the initial section, current mechanisms of reputation – be they applied to electronic markets or MAS – will be shown to have poor theoretical backgrounds, missing almost completely the cognitive and social properties of the phenomenon under study. In the rest of the chapter a social cognitive model of reputation developed in the last decade by some of the authors will be presented. Its simulation-based applications to the theoretical study of norm-ab...

Reputations can make or break citizens, communities, or companies. Reputations matter for individ... more 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 gossip – evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The present Handbook closes this gap, drawing on cutting edge insights from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and economics to philosophy, neurobiology and computer science. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current state of the art on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, no...

In Human-Robot Interaction domain many solutions have been proposed in order to achieve a smooth ... more 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 from a theoretical point of view, could be purposive mutual understanding, i.e. practical behaviors aimed to achieve a pragmatic goal as well as a communicative one, without any further specification. We start by discussing socially interactive robots and the solutions adopted to making them communicate. We then present our communication through actions theory, explaining why actions are so important and describing the path leading from actions to gestures. Finally, we discuss some implications of this way of communicating in the HRI field.

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2019

Review of:Eric Silverman (2018) Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling. Springer-... more Review of:Eric Silverman (2018) Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling. Springer-Verlag: Berlin

The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation, 2019

Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroying coo... more Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroying cooperation. The reason seems straightforward: gossip can make or break someone’s reputation. This chapter puts this standard reputational model to closer scrutiny. It argues that there are at least three other models to consider, and it presents an analytical framework to disentangle similarities and differences between these models. Explicating all three roles in the gossip triad, it allows to distinguish (a) individual motives behind gossiping, (b) its reputation effects on the actors, (c) the impact of gossip and reputation on the quality and sustainability of cooperation, and (d) the role of the context. Applying the framework reveals a deep divide between reputation and punishment models propagated by experimental economics and evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and coalition and control models informed by sociology, on the other hand. The chapter discusses implications for a s...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021

Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation... more 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, important details of reputation systems are still unclear. Our goal with this theme issue is to promote an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to explore and understand the evolution and maintenance of reputation systems with a special emphasis on gossip and honest signalling. The theme issue is organized around four main questions: What are the necessary conditions for reputation-based systems? What is the content and context of reputation systems? How can reputations promote cooperation? And, what is the role of gossip in maintaining reputation systems and thus cooperation? This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of coopera...

European Societies, 2020

ABSTRACT The covid-19 pandemic has strained organizational systems, with the health care field pa... more ABSTRACT 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 framework linking a social system’s resilience with individual behavior. We examine a population strongly affected by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic: nursing students participating in internship programs before and during the crisis. Of the 141 nursing students in our sample, 23% opted to continue their internship. Four characteristics of work teams (collaborative contact, shared understanding, task interdependence, and collaborative organizational cultures) are hypothesized to explain students’ continued occupational commitment during the crisis. Results from binomial logistic regression analyses show task interdependence and intrinsic motivation positively affect the decision for continued participation in internship programs during the pandemic.

The goal of this paper is to show the normative component of a convention adopted by a population... more 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. We consider this as a multilevel phenomenon occurring either at the individual psychological level or at the interpersonal one or, finally, at the collective macro social level. The latter thesis is that we consider this tendency as one of the possible paths of the spontaneous emergence of agents' commitments, of conventions and likely of real social norms: the tacit emergence of a prescriptive character and, then, of obligations and duties. We will examine the constitutive elements-both cognitive and relational-of this process of spontaneous transition from the predictive attitudes to the prescriptive ones and, on this basis, to real...

We present a cognitive model of opinion dynamics which studies the behavior of a population of in... more 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 results of our study show that alarmist opinions are more likely to be adopted by populations, since worried people

In this work, we propose an evolutionary account of reactions to a wrong as an integrated set. Un... more In this work, we propose an evolutionary account of reactions to a wrong as an integrated set. Unlike other theories, we are not interested in revenge, punishment or sanction per se, but in their coexistence. We posit that this variety of reactions is needed in order to achieve different goals, but it also implies an increase in cognitive costs that requires to be explained from an evolutionary perspective. Moving from the identification of the psychological traits that uniquely define each reaction, two concurrent hypotheses are suggested and discussed: either the richness of human social life requests a variety of reactions, or the benefits of single reactions at the psychological level allowed these reactions to be maintained in the social life.

Cooperation can be supported by indirect reciprocity via reputation.Thanks to gossip, reputations... more 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 ineffective if the partner selection mechanism is not robust. The aim of this work is to investigate the conditions under which the combination of gossip and ostracism might support cooperation in groups of different sizes. We are also interested in exploring the extent to which errors in transmission might undermine the reliability of gossip as a mechanism for identifying defectors. Our results show that a large quantity of gossip is necessary to support cooperation, and that group structure can mitigate the effects of errors in transmission.

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021

People use sanctioning behaviours differently according to what they believe and want to achieve,... more 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 understand 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 cognitive model of three distinct kinds of punishing behaviours, differentiated in terms of the defining cognitive patterns.

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by soc... more 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 this paper is to challenge the current theories on opinion by putting forward a cognitively grounded model where opinions are described as specific mental representations whose main properties are put forward. A comparison with reputation will be also presented.

reputation in simulations up to the current time and to get to know some of the approaches to imp... more 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 addressed. A short review of the state of the art will show the role of reputation in promoting (a) social control in cooperative contexts – like social groups and subgroups – and (b) partner selection in competitive contexts, like (e-) markets and industrial districts. In the initial section, current mechanisms of reputation – be they applied to electronic markets or MAS – will be shown to have poor theoretical backgrounds, missing almost completely the cognitive and social properties of the phenomenon under study. In the rest of the chapter a social cognitive model of reputation developed in the last decade by some of the authors will be presented. Its simulation-based applications to the theoretical study of norm-ab...

Reputations can make or break citizens, communities, or companies. Reputations matter for individ... more 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 gossip – evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The present Handbook closes this gap, drawing on cutting edge insights from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and economics to philosophy, neurobiology and computer science. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current state of the art on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, no...

In Human-Robot Interaction domain many solutions have been proposed in order to achieve a smooth ... more 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 from a theoretical point of view, could be purposive mutual understanding, i.e. practical behaviors aimed to achieve a pragmatic goal as well as a communicative one, without any further specification. We start by discussing socially interactive robots and the solutions adopted to making them communicate. We then present our communication through actions theory, explaining why actions are so important and describing the path leading from actions to gestures. Finally, we discuss some implications of this way of communicating in the HRI field.

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2019

Review of:Eric Silverman (2018) Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling. Springer-... more Review of:Eric Silverman (2018) Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling. Springer-Verlag: Berlin

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for indiv... more Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation.

The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools.

International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.