The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.1 The gossip theory might sound like a joke,

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“You can go back to the history and see that it was prevalent in Mesopotamia and Greece. Anthropologists talk about it being at the center of life in hunter-gatherer societies,” Gelfand says.

When popularity is in the driver’s seat without other values that complement and constrain it, we risk falling into what author and neuroscientist Erik Hoel calls a “gossip trap.” In a gossip trap, raw social power takes precedence over other ways of organizing society, returning us to a world of tribes and clans where reputation management and... See more