No Sword Bites So Fiercly as an Evil Tongue? Gossip Wrecks Reputation, but Enhances Cooperation (EVILTONGUE)

We will use traditional survey research methods based on self-reported gossip acts to test our hypotheses about the relationship between gossip and reputation. We will utilize two unique network panels that we collected in primary school classes (MTA TK “Lendület” RECENS data set, N1=1175, 4 waves, starting in 5th grade, 2013-2015) and secondary school classes (OTKA K 81336 data set, N1=1439, 4 waves, starting in 9th grade, 2010-2013). In both data sets, we measured gossip by self-reports using a full network roster of the class. In the secondary school data set, we asked senders to nominate the object of bad gossip (assuming that friends were receivers) on paper and pencil. In the primary school data set, respondents recorded triadic nominations (who do you tell bad things about whom) on tablets. As we noted earlier, this form of data could be analyzed by having the sender-object dyad as the dependent variable in ERGM and SIENA models, but in addition, we will develop new statistical techniques for the triadic analysis of gossip data.