Women’s Gossip as an Intrasexual Competition Strategy

In the evolutionary sciences, gossip is argued to constitute an adaptation that enabled human beings to disseminate information about and to keep track of others within a vast and expansive social network. Although gossip can effectively encourage in-group cooperation, it can also be used as a low-cost and covert aggressive tactic to compete with others for valued resources. In line with evolutionary logic, the totality of evidence to date …