Reputation
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Reputation is the general opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is a factor in many aspects of life, such as business, online communities and social status; and it includes the social connotations associated with an individual's name (for example, the surname 'Patricus' or 'Patricianus' signified membership of the social 'upper class', a member of a 'noble family', or the 'nobility' of ancient Rome). (See 'St. Patrick'.)
Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, such as markets, to cooperative ones, such as firms, organisations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on both individual and supra-individual levels. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organisations, countries, cultures and even civilisations). It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.
Consider the expression "it is said that (John Smith is a cheater)." This is intrinsically a reputation-spreading statement, because it refers to a supposed common opinion, as well as a factual assessment: "it is said" suggests at least one occasion on which something has actually been said. The speaker creates the appearance that (s)he is spreading the statement a bit further, when (s)he may actually be in the phase of initiating it.
While reputation can be used to predict future behaviour, it can have manipulative subgoals. Gossip can also be used as a tag only - as when gossipping about unreachable icons, such as royalty or showbiz celebrities - often used merely to show that the gossiper belongs to the group of "informed ones."
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A Cognitive view of Reputation
Until very recently, the cognitive nature of reputation was substantially ignored. This caused a misunderstanding of its role in a number of real-life domains and in related scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, the role of reputation as a partner-selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980's.
An interdisciplinary, integrated approach to reputation, accounting for its evolutionary basis as well as its cognitive mechanisms and processes, is still lacking. An integrated approach could result in guidelines for managing and designing technologies of reputation.
Working toward such a definition, reputation as a socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns attitudes toward social behaviour such as cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance. Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: its transmission allows socially "desirable" behaviour to emerge and persist even with low probability of repeated interaction.
Rather than concentrating solely on reputation as a property, the cognitive model accounts for its transmissibility, and therefore its propagation. This model requires a more refined classification of the multi-faceted cognitive concept commonly known as reputation.
A recommendation can be extremely precise - think for example of the stock market, where your advisor, when discussing the reputation of a bond, can supplement his informed opinion with both historical series and current events; or more vague - gossip may contain hints to both facts ("I've been told that this physician has shown questionable behaviour") and to information-based conflict (if one candidate for a role spreads doubtful reputation about another candidate, who should you trust?).
Consider, for example, the case of a communication between an advisee (who requests advice about the potential for danger in an economical transaction with a potential partner, target), and an advisor (evaluator) who is giving advice.
Roughly speaking, the advice could fall under one of the following three categories:
- the adviser declares that it believes the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction;
- the adviser declares that it believes that another (named or otherwise defined) agent or set of agents believes that the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction;
- the adviser declares that it believes that in an undefined set of agents, there is a belief that the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction.
Note the care to maintain the possible levels of truth (the adviser declares - but could be lying - that it believes - but could be wrong - etc.). The cases are listed in decreasing order of responsibility. While it might seem that most examples would fall within the first category, the other two are neither unnecessarily complicated nor infrequent. Indeed, most of the common gossip falls within the third category; and, except for electronic interaction, this is the most frequent form of referral. All examples concern the evaluation of a given object (target), and a social agent (which may be either individual or supraindividual, and in the latter case, either a group or a collective), held by another social agent, the evaluator.
The examples above can be more precisely defined using the above concept of social evaluation. At this point, we can coin a new lexical item, image, whose character should be immediately evident from the following:
Image
Image is a global or averaged evaluation of a given target on the part of an agent. It consists of a (set of) social evaluations about the characteristics of the target. Image as an object of communication is what is exchanged in examples 1 and 2, above. In the second case, we call it third-party image. It may concern a subset of the target's characteristics, e.g., its willingness to comply with socially accepted norms and customs, or its skills. The key characteristic of image is that it is an accepted evaluation (not necessarily the result of direct experience); nor does its definition pertain to a precise agent. Indeed, we can define special cases of image, including third-party image - the evaluation that an agent believes a third party has of the target - or even shared image: an evaluation shared by a group. Not even the latter is reputation, since it tries to define too precisely the mental status of the group.
Reputation
Reputation, as distinct from image, is the effect of transmission of a target image. More precisely, reputation transmission is a communication of an evaluation without the specification of the evaluator, if not for a group attribution, and only in the default sense discussed before. This covers the case of example 3 above. More precisely, reputation is a believed, social, meta-evaluation; it is built upon three distinct but interrelated facets: (1) a cognitive representation, or more precisely a believed evaluation - this could be somebody's image, but it is enough that this consist of a communicated evaluation; 2) a population object, i.e., a propagating, believed evaluation; and (3) an objective emergent property at the agent level, i.e., what the agent is believed to be. Reputation is a highly dynamic phenomenon in two distinct senses: it is subject to change, especially as an effect of corruption, errors, deception, etc.; and it emerges as an effect of a multi-level bidirectional process.
While image only moves (when transmitted and accepted) from one individual cognition to another, the anonymous character of reputation makes it a more complex phenomenon. Reputation proceeds from the level of individual cognition (when it is born, possible as an image, but not always) to the level of social propagation (at this level, it not necessarily believed by any agent) and from this level back to that of individual cognition again (when it is accepted).
Moreover, once it gets to the population level, Reputation gives rise to a further property at the agent level. It is both what people think about targets and what targets are in the eyes of others.
The spreading of reputation by the community can affect an agent's life, whether he or she wants it to or believes it will. To some, reputation seems like an immaterial, more powerful equivalent of a scarlet letter sewed to one's clothes. It can be more powerful if it is not perceived by the individual to whom it sticks, consequently out of the individual's power to control and manipulate.
Reputation-based decisions
Image and reputation are distinct objects. Both are social in two senses: they concern properties of another agent (the target's presumed attitude toward socially desired behaviour), and they may be shared by a multitude of agents. However, the two notions operate at different levels. Image is a belief, namely, an evaluation. Reputation is a meta-belief, i.e., a belief about others' evaluations of the target with regard to a socially desired behaviour. To better understand the difference between image and reputation, the mental decisions based upon them must be analysed at the following three levels:
- Epistemic
- accept the beliefs that form either a given image or acknowledge a given reputation. This implies that a believed evaluation gives rise to one's direct evaluation. Suppose I know that the friend I mostly admire has a good opinion of Mr. Berlusconi. However puzzled I may be by this dissonance-inducing news, I may be convinced due to my friendship to accept this evaluation and share it.
- Pragmatic-Strategic
- use image in order to decide whether and how to interact with the target. Once I have my own opinion (perhaps resulting from acceptance of others' evaluations) about a target, I will use it to make decisions about my future actions concerning that target. Perhaps, I may abstain from participating in political activity against Mr. Berlusconi.
- Memetic
- transmit my (or others') evaluative beliefs about a given target to others. Whether or not I act in conformity with a propagating evaluation, I may decide to spread the news to others.
Firm Reputation
Many businesses have public relations departments dedicated to managing their reputation. Incidents which damage a company's reputation for honesty or safety may cause serious damage to finances. For example, in 1999 Coca Cola lost $60 million (by its own estimate) after schoolchildren reported suffering from symptoms like headaches, nausea and shivering after drinking its products. [1]
Online Reputation
Reputation is a factor in any online community where trust is important. Examples include eBay, an auction service which uses a system of customer feedback to publicly rate each member's reputation. One study found that a good reputation added 7.6% to the price received [2].
Reputation and Ego
Concern over reputation is sometimes considered a human fault, exaggerated in importance due to the fragile nature of the human ego. Shakespeare provides the following insight from Othello:
Cassio. Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!
Iago. As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more offence in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.
Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice Act II. Scene III, 225-226.
