EUREKA!

EUREKA!

[NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH]

Gossip Is Good Please talk amongst yourselves.

Talking about other people at the proverbial water cooler often seems petty, but recent research suggests gossip can be “rich and multifaceted communication” and— wait till you hear this—beneficial. For the study, published in Current Biology, Eshin Jolly, Adv ’20, a postdoc in the College’s computational social affective neuroscience laboratory, and Luke Chang, a psychological and brain sciences prof and the lab’s director, developed what’s known as a “public goods” game. The online game sets up tension between self-interested “free riding” and cooperative behavior for the common good. When players have the chance to talk privately during the game, they often rely on secondhand information to help one another. Such exchanges can strengthen social bonds and help people learn from others’ experiences.

We Want More

Income drives services economy.

»> The weakening of the U.S. manufacturing sector is sometimes blamed on robotics, trade conflicts with China, or rising prices. New research led by economics prof Diego Comin and published in Econometrica shows that rising incomes are the dominant force “because we want to consume more services as we become richer,” he says, not because fewer goods are produced. As income grows, services overtake manufacturing to become an economy’s dominant sector. The researchers aggregated historical data in 39 countries and found that rising incomes, not prices, account for the bulk of these shifts.

Nancy Schoeffler