Americans Protect Their Reputation By Thinking About the Future, Shows New study

A good reputation is extremely valuable in social life, but people sometimes do things that harm their reputations. How do people avoid going for short-term rewards and aim to protect their reputation in the long run?  One way to protect one’s reputation from harm is to think about the future before acting, according to new research appearing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Prior research has shown that people who engage in future thinking are better at achieving their long-term goals, and tend to be more generous in economic games in virtual scenarios. It seems this future thinking also applies to reputation protection.

“People can be tempted by short-term gains that will harm their reputation in the long run; easy money through petty crime, romantic affairs, skipping work, or hoarding and price gouging items like toilet paper and hand sanitizer during a pandemic,” says Andy Vonasch, one of the study’s co-authors. “People who successfully avoid those temptations and maintain good reputations do so in part by thinking about the future consequences of their actions.”

The team studied the choices of 1,492 Americans across three studies.  In each one, they gave hypothetical situations and measured or manipulated if people were thinking about the future or thinking about the present, when making their decisions.

“Your reputation is like a key that unlocks opportunities,” says Vonasch. “If people know they can trust you, they will open up doors to future possibilities you didn’t even know existed. Without this key, everything becomes more difficult—whether it's attracting friends, romantic partners, and teammates, getting investors or customers to support your business, or getting someone to help you when you're in need.”

In one study people had to make a hypothetical decision if they’d be willing to spend a year in jail in order to not have a criminal record, thus protecting their reputation, or a lesser fine and a known criminal record. For those thinking about the future*, 78% choose jail time, and for those thinking about the present, only 57% choose jail time.

In another scenario, people were wrongfully accused of stealing from a charity and given the option to pay $1000 to protect their reputation or not pay and be the subject of a believable rumor that they are a thief. 60% thinking about the future were willing to pay a fine, while only 44% of those thinking about the present would.

The results generalized to different choice scenarios in which participants had to decide whether they would pay an immediate cost (money or going to jail) to prevent a devastating rumor from spreading in their social network. In a final high-powered replication experiment, participants who focused on the future were 15% more likely to make a reputation-protective choice than participants who focused on the present.

 “Don’t forget what you do now will affect how people think about you later.” Says Vonasch.

 

* The researchers acknowledge that it is an open question to what extent the present findings would generalize to real-life situations with actual consequences to the decision-maker.


Study: Vonasch, Andrew J., and Hallgeir Sjåstad. “Future-Orientation (as Trait and State) Promotes Reputation-Protective Choice in Moral Dilemmas.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, June 2020, doi:10.1177/1948550619899257.

Press may request a copy of the study at [email protected]

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Don’t Worry, Your Reputation Is Not at Stake

Consider this situation: Near the end of a successful dinner party, after dessert, the host pulls out Trivial Pursuit. A few people smile politely, but the mood in the room turns bleak, even tense. “Oh gosh,” sighs one guest. Another guest reaches for a second glass of wine and quips, “This might not help my performance, but it’ll make me care less when everyone thinks I’m an idiot.”

Many of us have played these sorts of games numerous times. Through those experiences, we’ve learned which of our friends and family members are trivia buffs and which ones are not up on their obscure mountain ranges and 1990’s Oscar winners. But we don’t usually leave such evenings feeling like we know who is a genius and who is an idiot. At the same time, though, most of us can empathize with the fear that our competence is on display and that others may form negative impressions of us.

This disconnect—between what other people actually see in our behavior (specific skills such as trivia knowledge) and what we think they see (broad, general abilities like intelligence)—is called the overblown implications effect. This effect involves the fact that we tend to think that other people draw broader conclusions than they actually do about our general skills and abilities from how we behave on a single, specific task.

Across eight studies and over 4,300 participants, we found that people consistently overblew the implications of various behaviors in the eyes of others. They thought that a single batch of their cookies would reveal their cooking abilities, a parallel parking attempt would reveal their general driving ability, and an instance of cheating on their diet would reveal their level of self-control. But, in reality, other participants who judged these behaviors saw the implications of each behavior as narrower and did not draw these kinds of general conclusions about people’s personal characteristics.

Why do people display the overblown implications effect? One answer is that when people are “on stage”—that is, when they are about to perform a behavior that others will see—the task they are about to do often feels particularly important for demonstrating some general ability. When we are about to answer a trivia question, we start to think of trivia ability as the essential skill that defines intelligence. Likewise, when a basketball player lines up to attempt the game-winning free throw, she may feel like it’s not just her free-throw skills that are on display but also her general competence as an athlete.

Of course, people do judge us—at least somewhat—in light of our behavioral performances, but the inferences people draw are more limited than we think they are. We are correct in thinking that those who watch us play chess make judgments about how good of a chess player we are, but we err in thinking that they also decide whether or not we are, more generally, a good analytical thinker. And, it’s not merely that we believe others always judge us more negatively than they do. When our participants succeeded during a mock game show, they also thought observers saw them as more of a genius than those observers actually did. People overblow implications of their behavior in both positive and negative directions.

How do you fix this way of thinking? We found support for a simple intervention. In one study, participants who answered a trivia question right or wrong overestimated how much observers would decide that they were quite intelligent or unintelligent, respectively. But when those participants first listed all the ways—other than answering trivia questions—that someone like them could reveal that they were or were not intelligent, they no longer overblew the implications of their trivia performance. This intervention helped put trivia ability in proper perspective, as just one of many domains that reflect one’s intelligence.

So, the next time you feel that tickle of apprehension as you consider being judged in light of whether the steak you cook comes out a true medium-rare, whether the handwritten note you composed includes a misspelled word, or whether you forgot an acquaintance’s name, consider this advice supported by our research: Take a moment to think about all of the other ways in which your cooking ability, intelligence, or considerateness can be displayed. Not only will this help you get a better handle on how you are coming across, but it can also help you avoid some needless anxiety along the way.


For Further Reading

Moon, A., Gan, M., & Critcher, C.R. (2020). The overblown implications effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118, 720-742.
 

Alice Moon studies how preferences, judgments, and choices change based on the perspective people take or the way a decision is framed. She is an assistant professor of operations, information, and decisions at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of research, Alice enjoys exploring new foods and stand-up comedy.

Clayton Critcher studies how people make judgments about themselves and others in social, economic, political, and moral domains. He is an associate professor of marketing, cognitive science, and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. When not in the lab, you’ll find him playing bar shuffleboard (often a bit too seriously).

Hunter-gatherers Agree on What is Moral, but not Who is Moral

Morality plays a role in everyday lives, from interactions with friends and strangers, to political views and social influences. Social psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania wanted to know whether there was a universal concept of moral character, by looking beyond Western populations. According to their work with the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, the Hadza agree on which traits are relevant to moral character, but not on who has character.

The research appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Interviewing Hadza hunter-gatherers to rank the people they live with on a number of traits, such as who has a good heart, who shares the most, and who works the hardest, the team found that Hadza agreed on how important generosity and hard work was to moral character, but disagreed on who most exemplified these traits.

“They disagreed on who among them had the most moral character,” says Kristopher Smith, a Penn postdoctoral fellow and lead paper author.

Smith and Coren Apicella, an associate professor of Psychology, had 94 judges rank their campmates on global character and relevant character traits for a total of 824 observations.

The Hadza live in small nomadic groups and move from group to group so that the social structure of each group frequently changes.

Scientists suspect this nomadic way of living gives insight into the origins of human cooperation. Although the researchers note that the Hadza are a modern people, living in modern times, their way of living is more similar to how human ancestors lived than in western societies.

“It’s not that the Hadza do not have a concept of morality or don’t care about it. They agreed on what traits contributed to moral character. But they cannot agree on who exemplifies it,” says Smith.

Previous work by Apicella and Smith looking at generosity found that this trait changed depending on the group dynamic. A generous group led members to be more generous, and a group that didn’t share much led to others not sharing as well.

It may be this mobility and changing group dynamics that drive their current findings as well, as Apicella notes that “the changing of groups and behavior may make it difficult for individuals to track and agree on moral reputations.”

From the 1,000-foot morality perspective, “this suggests that, for the Hadza, there is little consistent moral behavior across situations, and that reputation may have played a smaller role in the evolution of morality,” says Smith.

“Understanding how moral psychology differs across cultures and in different social systems may provide insight into ways to improve our interactions with one another, and maybe overcome moral disagreements in our society,” summarizes Smith.


This research was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust and the Moral Beacons Project.

Study:  Smith, Kristopher and Apicella, Coren. Hadza hunter-gatherers disagree on perceptions of moral character (2019) Social Psychological and Personality Science. Online before print September 5, 2019.

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.