RUMOR HAS IT

Gossip has a bad reputation. Rumor Has It makes the case that it is one of the most consequential technologies humans ever developed, the mechanism by which reputations get built and destroyed and trust gets extended or withheld.

Drawing on evolutionary science, anthropology, neuroscience, and archival history, the book follows gossip out of the small groups where it evolved and into the networks that now carry it at a speed no village ever had to absorb.