ABSTRACT
D uring an interview, Kurt Vonnegut once advised young writers as follows. “If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human fi gure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings” (Vonnegut, 1965). This insight has been shared by both psychologists and (more recently) cognitive neuroscientists, who have remarked on the centrality other people hold in our mental lives. People are astoundingly effi cient at gaining information about the contents of other people’s thoughts and spend a great deal of their time inferring and responding to them. One group of researchers who recorded, transcribed, and categorized everyday conversations has found that gossip (defi ned as “anything that has to do with explicit social activities, personal relationships, and personal likes and dislikes”) accounts for about two thirds of the time people spend talking to each other, further underscoring the importance of social cognition (Dunbar, 2004).
