Alexander Karan

Who they are

The work of Alexander Karan reaches this site through the paper listed below. On this site the name is tied to Gossip, Reputation.

Key papers

Robbins, M. L., & Karan, A. (2020). Who gossips and how in everyday life? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(2), 185-195. What it reports: Five naturalistic studies with 467 people who wore a device that sampled ambient sound for two to five days. Gossip was mostly neutral in tone and mostly about social information, and people who gossiped more tended to be more extraverted.

Key ideas

Gossip: Everyday talk about who did what, the low-cost end of norm enforcement.

Reputation: What a group collectively believes about a person's conduct, updated as people share what they have seen.

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