Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Communication is a powerful means to disseminate socialinformation, and gossip is an effective way of obtainingupdated information about others. However, without acomprehensive theoretical framework of socialcommunication, it is difficult to predict a priori when and whysocial information will be disseminated. There are generaltheories of human social interaction, however, they do notsufficiently capture the sociocognitive components underlyinghuman decision-making in social settings. Therefore, we havedeveloped a model of social communication, enabling thecharacterization of specific conditions under which socialinformation will be spread: for example, when an agent shoulddirectly communicate with the target of the information, gossipit to others, or simply do nothing. We describe the model, themethods used to generate model predictions, and then list ninepredictions derived from it as the current results. We next planto test the predictions empirically and develop the modelcomputationally.