Reputation

What it is

Reputation is built and revised largely through talk. A ten-day diary study by Terence Dores Cruz and colleagues found that people often passed on information about how cooperative others were, that listeners mostly believed it and updated their view, and that better reputations made listeners more willing to help. In experiments by Junhui Wu, Daniel Balliet and Paul Van Lange, the ability to gossip raised cooperation and earnings more than punishment did.

In effect

In the article on why we gossip, it is the thing gossip maintains: the shared record that lets a group reward cooperation.

What it does not say

It describes how reputations move within groups. It does not say a reputation is always accurate, or that what others say about a person is a fair measure of them.

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