Essays on Reputation and Decision Making

Abstract

An extensive literature demonstrates that people care deeply about the impressions they leave on others (Lerner and Tetlock, 1999; Tetlock, 2000, 2002). Decision makers strive to maintain positive reputations and observers reward those who have such positive reputations. Across the following three essays, I explore how observer perceptions of behavior align with—and influence—people’s decision making in the domains of ideological disagreement and gender. The first essay tests whether interpersonal concerns are a driver of selective exposure to ideologically-aligned information. Specifically, I develop a social signaling model of selective exposure, which predicts that (1) individuals shift their information selection decisions to signal to observers and (2) observers reward such shifts. This model is tested across five financially-incentivized, pre-registered experiments (N = 3,598), finding that tailoring one’s information selection decisions can indeed have strategic value—but only under certain theoretically-predictable conditions. The second essay directly extends these results by developing a psychological model for how engagement with opposing views will be perceived by others—identifying when engagement might lead to interpersonal rewards versus costs. The third essay builds on the foundation that perceptions of others are a key predictor of behavior, but turns the attention to gender. Across fifteen empirical studies (N = 8,979), the third essay documents robust evidence for believed gender differences in social preferences. Specifically, people expect that women are more generous and more equality-oriented—despite finding little to no evidence for differences in behavior between men and women. Additionally, building upon the associative memory literature, this essay provides causal evidence for one source of such beliefs. Taken together, these three essays highlight not only how reputational considerations shape decision making and biases, but also suggests novel mitigation strategies.