People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation

By John Whitfield

How to get a good reputation—deserved or not!—and why we care what other people think

Why does a fish only bite another fish if no one else is watching? Why do people overshare online? Why do some people meet trivial insults with extreme violence? Why do so many gods have multiple eyes? In People Will Talk, science writer John Whitfield shows how reputation helps answer all of these questions, and more. What is the secret to getting get a good reputation? Unfortunately, there's more to reputation than being a good person or being good at what you do. Your reputation belongs to other people, and it's created by what they say about you behind your back. You have a good reputation only if you have a strong social network—a large and close-knit network of friends, family, and allies—to spread good news about you and shout down ugly rumors. If you’ve ever wondered why we care about the lives of celebrities, why young men publicly upload to the Internet pictures of themselves engaged in drunken or dangerous antics, how to make the “honor system” a little more widely honored, how to keep politicians honest, or what keeps gossip going, reputation will give you a clue.

• Almost from the moment we are born, we are trying to work out whom we can trust and trying to make others think the best of us.
• We carry on doing so throughout life, even when we don't realize it, every time we meet another person in business, friendship, or romance; every time we read celebrity gossip; and every time we tweak our Facebook profiles.
• Whether you’re buying a car or selling one, looking for a job or hiring, asking someone out on a date or deciding whether to accept the invitation, reputation matters.

Read People Will Talk and discover how to polish your own reputation, understand what you hear about others, and make the most of both.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118114667

John Whitfield

Selma has been writing since she was old enough to remember. She especially loves to Write silly stories for anyone that loves to laugh.she loves children and loves to rhyme. She thinks imagination is an important building block in child development. She believes that silly rhyming colorful stories Can help instill a love of books in a child. Come into the imaginary world of Selma McDizzy and learn to love to read! More Books from the Silly Chilly collection coming soon!!!

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Introduction

Cassio: Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.

Iago: As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense 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.

—William Shakespeare, Othello, act II, scene III

As 1996 began, an increasing amount of Pierre Omidyar’s time was taken up with a site called AuctionWeb, which he had launched a few months earlier as a hobby. One chore of Omidyar’s was fielding about a dozen e-mails a day from buyers or sellers who were in dispute. AuctionWeb made no attempt to control its users, charged no fees, and gave no guarantees; it was simply a digital market, a place for buyers and sellers to meet. When complaints came in, Omidyar, who had a day job as a computer programmer, would forward the message to the other person involved and ask the parties to resolve the matter between themselves. This usually worked, but Omidyar would have preferred not to get involved at all.¹

AuctionWeb was possibly the least reassuring trading environment ever devised. Buyers were invited to bid on products they hadn’t seen and then send money to people they didn’t know, who were identified by usernames and virtual storefronts that had cost them nothing to set up and would cost them nothing to replace under different names. In such a situation, the obvious risk was that without someone in charge who had the power to punish bad behavior, AuctionWeb would become what economists call a market for lemons. Buyers, worried that their purchases would arrive in worse condition than advertised or not arrive at all, would bid low. High-quality sellers would take their goods elsewhere, and a race to the bottom would start, resulting in a yard sale where junk was sold for pennies.

Omidyar, and those who were using his site, had run up against the question of how to work out whom you can trust. AuctionWeb, because it seemed to demand blind faith from its users, highlighted the matter, but it’s a question that we all face every day, just about every time we meet another human being, online or in the flesh, in business, romance, friendship, politics, or simply while listening to the morning weather report. When we decide to trust, we invest some combination of time, energy, and resources in other people, in the belief that they will keep their side of the bargain. The other guys do the same.

Omidyar could tell that blind faith was not getting the job done. He needed a machine for manufacturing trust that AuctionWeb’s users could fuel and operate. The solution he came up with was to allow users to rate one another, awarding +1 as a reward, −1 as a punishment, and 0 as the neutral option. If users wanted, they could also leave a short written comment. What everyone said about everyone else would be on public display. By creating a record of past behavior, this feedback aimed to give honest sellers of high-quality merchandise an escape route from the market for lemons and give buyers a way to find these sellers.

In February 1996 Omidyar unveiled this system and posted a letter on the site:

Most people are honest. And they mean well. Some people go out of their way to make things right. I’ve heard great stories about the honesty of people here. But some people are dishonest. Or deceptive. This is true here, in the newsgroups, in the classifieds, and right next door. It’s a fact of life. But here, those people can’t hide. We’ll drive them away. Protect others from them. This grand hope depends on your active participation. Become a registered user. Use our feedback forum. Give praise where it is due; make complaints where appropriate.²

That month, Omidyar also began to charge sellers a percentage of the sale price to post listings on AuctionWeb, because the site was getting so much traffic that his Internet service provider had upped its fees. Fast-forward fourteen years, and in the first quarter of 2011 eBay, as AuctionWeb is now known, announced revenues of $2.5 billion.

EBay feedback is what’s known as an online reputation system. If you like to measure a thing’s significance in dollars, Omidyar’s feat of alchemy proves the power of reputation. He used other people’s willingness to gossip about one another and to act on that gossip to turn his hobby into a multibillion-dollar business.

As a summary of human nature, Omidyar’s manifesto is hard to beat. But its common-sense assertions open out into a hall of wonders and mysteries. Most people really are honest and well-meaning—most of us, most of the time, can be trusted. Why, given the advantages of being otherwise, is that? Why, on the other hand, are some people dishonest and deceptive? And why could Omidyar count on his users to unmask and exclude such people? After all, even if I get a good deal, I may never buy anything from that seller again—so why bother to praise him? And if I get ripped off, I know not to deal with that person again—so why take the time to warn others about him?

This book is about the ways we work out how to trust people and how we persuade them to put their trust in us. As eBay users were among the first to discover, the digitized, often faceless, world in which we spend an increasing amount of our time and money has thrust these problems on us in new forms. Had our species not been able to answer them in the past, however, there would be no eBay on which to be defrauded or Internet, computers, books, shops, cities, civilization, or society. Our willingness to trust strangers and to be trustworthy is one of the most amazing and powerful things in the history of life and one of the hardest to explain.

Every time people interact, they create ripples of information that spread across their social ponds. People are consistent; how they’ve behaved in the past tends to be a good guide to how they’ll behave in the future, so by detecting and interpreting these ripples, other people can decide to trust us or avoid us. Reputation, to put it another way, is indirect experience, a labor-saving device that allows us to sample other people before we buy into them.

Of course, reputation doesn’t only report on behavior, it shapes it. The likelihood that how others treat us in the future will depend on what we do now negates the short-term benefits of sneakiness. The knowledge that others are watching and learning turns our every action into a message intended to show our character and inclinations in the best light. Reputation allows us to take fewer precautions and forces us to take fewer liberties. As Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1766, A dealer is afraid of losing his character, and is scrupulous in observing every engagement. When a person makes perhaps 20 contracts in a day, he cannot gain so much by endeavouring to impose on his neighbours, as the very appearance of a cheat would make him lose.³ We live in what the philosopher Robert Axelrod called the shadow of the future. In the 250 years since Smith put the power of reputation in a nutshell, economists have probably given the matter more thought than any other group (although novelists must come close). They respect reputation as a force that can make people honest and fair, even when they are driven only by self-interest; they have no morality beyond what they can get away with; and there is no external authority to enforce rules of conduct.

But reputation overshadows more than the dealings of merchants. A huge part of our nature, of who we are and what we do, is geared toward influencing and monitoring third parties. Without realizing it or meaning it, we run our lives so as to advertise our virtues, hide our vices, and uncover other people’s abilities and intentions. Reputation has left its mark in our brains, our language, our emotions, our beliefs, our morals, and our best and worst instincts. And the study of reputation’s influence on human behavior bridges evolutionary biology, economics, computing, psychology, neuroscience, and any other discipline that straddles the natural and social sciences. By bringing the insights of these fields together, I aim to show how deeply reputation is embedded in our biology. I also want to show that reputation’s ability to encourage good behavior and deter bad, as well as deciding our success as individuals, is a vital part of a well-functioning society—which is why Omidyar needed to import it into AuctionWeb—and that when things go wrong, the ways in which people use or escape reputation is often part of the problem.

We’ll begin by looking at what reputation is, where it comes from, and how you get one. Many other species have worked out that the best way to make a decision is to copy someone else. Many of the tools that reputation exploits were in place long before humans came on the scene. Birds, fish, apes, and insects pay close attention to their fellows and use that information to guide their own behavior. Once this starts happening, an animal being watched can begin to manipulate its audience: by showing how rich it is in physical, intellectual, or material resources, for example. This is one type of reputation, and humans, through their conspicuous acts of courage, strength, and generosity, pursue it as enthusiastically as any other species.

Not everyone can afford to advertise in this way, but everyone can do someone else a good turn. By helping another, we shape how everyone, not just the beneficiary, treats us in the future. Thus can reputation turn a group of selfish, boastful, gossipy, judgmental, and vengeful animals into a society of altruistic, generous, cooperative, and self-sacrificing humans.

Because reputation is a by-product of gossip, however, it depends on what other people say about us behind our backs. This has little to do with our behavior and a lot to do with other people’s social connections and self-interest. Once you start thinking about reputation like this, a lot of its injustices start to make sense. You might be a great writer, like Herman Melville, but still die in obscurity for want of the right social network or skill for self-promotion. (Every society, whaling ship or not, has its Queequegs, quietly doing a brilliant job for a small reward, and its Ahabs, influential, charismatic, well-connected, and stark, staring mad.) We do, though, have a way to shape what other people think about us that is more reliable for being involuntary—the looks on our faces. Our most painful and most rewarding emotions send signals that tell the watching world what to think of us.

All of these deeds and instincts help us gain and defend a reputation for kindness and generosity. To evolutionary biologists, who seek to explain how selfishness can lead to altruism, such acts are the hardest to explain. Turn on the news, though, and you’ll see that for the rest of us the terrible things that people do to one another are most noteworthy and troubling. One powerful aspect of reputation is that it can help to explain both the rage and disgust we feel at the news of a faraway atrocity, our desire to see the perpetrators brought to justice, and, conversely, the unconscious calculations that drive people to harm one another in ways that seem not just immoral but irrational and counterproductive. Understanding the environments that reward intimidation—where the best reputation to have is one that drives people away—makes sense of a good deal of the world’s violence.

Reputation isn’t just a way to encourage good deeds, it’s also a way to prevent bad ones. It allows the control of behavior through surveillance. Again, other animals have these skills: to look at the tactics of species from chickadees to chimpanzees, you might think that back in the Precambrian, as soon as life got two neurons to rub together its first thought was What’s he/she/it up to over there? followed quickly by What does she/he/it think of me, and how can I manipulate that to my advantage? You might also think that, having invented language, humans were not so interested in this. But in fact the reverse is true—the sense of being watched is one of the most powerful influences on human behavior, and we are uniquely specialized to control one another with our eyes. But, of course, gossip also plays a huge part in social control, both as a means of bringing offenders into line and as a means of bringing rivals down by attacking their reputations. Reputation is a way for societies to control their members: it is made in social connections and dies at social barriers. When people are isolated from one another, the selfish sides of our natures are uninhibited. This can happen through accidents of technology and economics, or it can be the deliberate strategy of the psychopath who must stay one step ahead of his reputation.

Finally, we’ll look at two social situations that our species has never encountered before: the online world and the world of cooperation between groups and nations. In the first of these, reputation is everywhere, although we are still working out how to adapt, or curb, our ancient instincts to cope with the novelties of online social information. In the second, reputation has until now been largely absent—which is one reason global cooperation is so hard to obtain. Is there any hope for harnessing reputation on such a scale?

Reputation is uncomfortable because it gives other people power over us. In William Shakespeare’s play Othello, when Cassio laments his lost reputation and Iago tells him to get a grip, each is half right. Our reputations, if not actually immortal, do outlive us, advancing or damaging our interests—influencing the way people treat our children, for example—just as they did during our lives. And Iago, although some way from being an honest man, is right to think that how a reputation is gained and lost often bears little relation to what we actually do. But both Cassio and Iago are wrong in thinking that a man can hold and control his own reputation. The reason our reputations survive our personal extinction is that they are not part of ourselves. This isn’t how it feels—we hold our sense of worth and honor dear, and when they are injured it does feel like a bodily wound. Yet our reputations belong not to us but to those who know us or know of us. The information from which our reputations are made lives in others’ minds.⁴

Another way to think of your reputation is as the part of you that lives inside other bodies. This distributed self is both an ambassador and a hostage, a point of influence and a point of weakness. It can make other people do your bidding, but it’s also a remote control pointing back to you. It can be harmed by your own blunders or bad decisions or because it suits the captor’s interests. It’s not up to Cassio or anyone else to decide whether he has lost his reputation. That’s what makes it one of the most powerful influences on human behavior. Reputation is not what humans use to measure one another; it’s what they use to control one another. It might look like a yardstick, but it’s really a cattle prod.

1. Cohen, A., The Perfect Store: Inside EBay (Boston: Little, Brown and Company: 2003).

2. Feedback, eBay.co.uk, http://pages.ebay.co.uk/services/forum/feedback-foundersnote.html.

3. Smith, A., Lecture on the Influence of Commerce on Manners, reprinted in Klein, D. B., ed., Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 17–20.

4. Craik, K. H., Reputation: A Network Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

CHAPTER 1

Follow the Leader

I have in front of me the color magazine from my newspaper’s Saturday edition. On the back cover, an improbably hairless Matthew McConaughey is advertising a Dolce and Gabbana scent. Inside, Diane Kruger is doing the same for Calvin Klein. Michael Owen, a famous soccer player, parades his taste in watches. Closer to the back, where the advertisements tend to be less glamorous, a seventy-something television presenter extols the virtues of a foot massager. Another week it might have been Nicole Kidman on the back cover, advertising Omega watches, or George Clooney pushing a coffee maker.

Companies pay a lot for someone famous to hold up their product and smile. Accenture, an accountancy firm, paid millions to be associated with Tiger Woods. They had second thoughts when his marriage fell apart. Such decisions, flying as they do in the face of golf and adultery’s irrelevance to accountancy, show how deep-seated our interest is in what other people are up to.

Kevin Laland began working on nine-spined sticklebacks more than a decade ago, by accident. Britain’s ponds and streams contain two species of this small fish: the nine-spined and the three-spined. Laland, who studies animal behavior at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, sent a colleague out to collect some of the three-spined variety from a nearby pond. The colleague had just started working in the lab, however, and couldn’t tell the difference between the two, so she came back with both. Since the team had both species, the researchers decided to experiment on them.

The team put seven fish into a tank split by clear plastic dividers into three compartments. Two of the compartments were feeding areas, each containing three fish. The final fish was confined in an observation area, where there was no food. One feeding area received a regular stream of bloodworms, which sticklebacks like to eat. The three fish in the other feeding area got either nothing or far fewer worms. After letting the fish in the observation compartment watch both areas for a few minutes, the researchers removed the other fish from the feeding areas, released the observer, and watched where it went.

The fish in the observation area could have spent its time monitoring its peers and learning which feeding station was the better bet. That’s what the nine-spined stickleback did. Or the fish in the observation area could have spent its time minding its own business, learning nothing about where to eat. That’s what the three-spined stickleback did, when it was its turn, heading to each feeding station at random.¹ Thanks to the mix-up in species, Laland’s team had stumbled on a fish with social skills. Oddly, those skills were in a fish (the nine-spined stickleback) very similar to one lacking such skills (the three-spined stickleback).

Life is about decisions, for both humans and fish. Should I eat here or try somewhere else? Are there any predators about? Should I try to annex my neighbor’s territory? Is this a good place to make my home? Would that male make a suitable father for my offspring? Such choices determine the difference between life and death, both in the space of a few seconds and in an evolutionary sense, between sending offspring into the next generation and being a genetic dead-end. One way to decide is through instinct alone, to have hardwired responses to the environment. This works well in stable environments: if the right thing to do goes on being the right thing to do for a long-enough time, there’s a strong possibility that natural selection will inscribe that behavior in an animal’s genes. Woodlice come into the world preferring cool, damp, dark places to warm, dry, brightly lit ones. This sends them scuttling to safety under rocks—it worked for their parents and grandparents and each preceding generation, and chances are it will go on working. When a woodlouse makes a decision, history does the heavy lifting.

This isn’t always reliable. Caterpillars that once hatched from their eggs just as succulent young leaves were bursting out on the trees are finding, in a warming world with earlier springs, that the leaves are already old and tough when they most need them. Humans who evolved hearty appetites for fat and sugar in an environment where both were scarce are not well adapted to all-you-can-eat buffets. Hardwired behaviors are not much use in an unpredictable environment—if, for example, the best spots for prey change from day to day. Here, you need the capacity to learn.

One way to do this is by trial and error. This yields valuable firsthand experience, but it can also be expensive: spend too long in a barren feeding spot and it might be too late to try somewhere else. In addition, personal knowledge gives you a sample size of only one. A bird whose nest fails in one year doesn’t know whether it really picked a bad spot or whether something else, perhaps bad weather or simply bad luck, was to blame for its barren year.

Yet an animal needn’t rely solely on its own experience. It is surrounded by information, in the form of what others are doing. Animals suck that public information up and put it to their own ends. At its most basic, this means copying. One of the most powerful rules of thumb available to animals is that it’s a good idea to do what others are doing. Most animals do not survive to adulthood, and many of those do not find a mate, breed, and raise offspring. So if they can see any animal that seems to be doing well, chances are it is doing something right, and other animals could do worse than to copy it.

This, then, is how the nine-spined stickleback decides where to feed—it copies its neighbors. It seems like such an obvious tactic that the puzzle becomes why its three-spined cousin trusts only in personal experience. The answer is that three-spined sticklebacks can better afford to make mistakes. They have hefty spines and armored plates on their bodies that make them an uncomfortable mouthful; several predatory fish such as pike have been seen to swallow and spit out a three-spined stickleback in rapid succession. Nine-spined sticklebacks are more delicate, with smaller spines and no armor. They hide in the weeds and peek out, watchful for signs of danger and safety, before committing to a feeding sortie. Spininess and social awareness, Laland’s team found, are different solutions to the same problem.

This copying behavior is called social learning, and it’s seen in all kinds of animals in all kinds of situations.² Some birds that nest in dense colonies won’t start breeding in a site unless another bird is already there, however suitable that site may be. Conservationists who are trying to restore populations of colonial seabirds, such as puffins and terns, have used decoys to lend an empty site an air of popularity and so encourage birds to colonize a new area. Of course, hunters cottoned on to this long ago and use decoys to make the spot just in front of their guns seem more appealing to passing waterfowl.

Compared to most of the world’s animal species, birds and even sticklebacks have pretty big brains. Yet you don’t need much of a brain or a social life to tap into public information. The wood cricket has neither, yet it still takes notice of its neighbors’ decisions. One of the main threats to crickets comes from wolf spiders, and if a cricket knows there are spiders about, it becomes cautious, spending more of its time hiding under leaves. If you then introduce a cricket that has never encountered a spider into a group of recently spooked insects, it will also hide under leaves, even if there are no spiders around.³ This suggests that animals can evolve the ability to copy if such information is useful in their particular circumstances.

Sometimes, what an animal’s neighbors are doing can make it go against the evidence of its own eyes. One of the most important choices any animal makes is whom to mate with. For most species, courtship is brief and the consequences costly and irreversible, so any piece of information they can get before committing is priceless. One such piece of information is whom others are choosing. If you, a female, see another female mating with a male, it’s a vote in his favor (as long as you’re not expecting him to provide any care for your offspring, which goes for most animal species), and you should be more likely to mate with him. This is called mate-choice copying, and the first species that was shown to behave this way in a controlled experiment was another small fish, the Trinidadian guppy, which lives in mountain streams on the eponymous Caribbean island.

Female guppies are functionally proportioned and colored. Males have larger and more brightly colored tails; under selective breeding by humans, this tail can become a garish fan, like a flamenco dancer’s dress. As far as most females are concerned, the brighter a male is, the better. This preference passes from mother to daughter, and when Lee Dugatkin began working on guppies in the late 1980s, this was the beginning and the end of it—researchers thought that a female’s taste in mates was genetically programmed. Dugatkin thought that it might be more complicated. There were already hints from studies of other species that females noticed both the attributes of males and the choices of other females when they picked a mate. The guppy, because it lives in shoals and because a lot was already known about how it chose a mate, was an ideal species in which to examine how peer pressure influences what females