Understanding human social communication: a computational model of gossip

Updating people about the actions of others—social communication—is a powerful means by which humans learn about the world and maintain stable societies. However, how the mind/brain achieves this ability computationally remains unclear. Our goal is to model when, how, and why people choose to communicate information about others to others. Here we present current progress. We first describe our social communication framework, the test paradigm for model development and assessment, and an empirical experiment we conducted to obtain novel data to test model predictions. We then present our model, and compare it with two others. Our model outperformed the others, capturing the main patterns of the empirical data and matching the specific results most closely (i.e., percent of cases deciding to communicate about a target individual). Thus, our model successfully simulates human social decision-making, helping to understand how it is achieved by the human mind/brain.