Le virtù del pettegolezzo

In this work a theory of gossip as a means for social control is proposed. Exercising social control roughly means to isolate and/or to punish cheaters. However, punishment is costly and it inevitably implies the problem of second-order cooperation. Moving from a cognitive model of social control and gossip, data from ethnographic studies and agent- based simulations are reported on to support the claim that gossip reduces the costs of social control without lowering its efficacy.