October 16, 2007 -- LONDON - Gossip is more powerful than facts, a study showed yesterday, suggesting people believe what they hear through the grapevine even if they have evidence to the contrary.

In the study, researchers gave students playing a computer game money they could give to others in a series of rounds.

The students, meanwhile, also wrote notes about how others played the game that everyone could review.

Students tended to give less money to people described as "nasty misers" or "scrooges" and more to those depicted as "generous players" or "social players," says the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers then took the game a step further and showed the students the actual decisions made by fellow players. But they also supplied false gossip that contradicted that evidence.

In these cases, the students based their decisions to award money on the gossip, rather than the hard evidence, showing such information is a powerful tool, said Ralf Sommerfeld, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who led the study.

"Rationally if you know what the people did, you should care, but they still listened to what others said," Sommerfeld said.