scholar.google.com/citations?us...

🔭 Next up: We’re excited to explore how reputations work in different contexts (work, personal life, etc.) and how aggregating views from different contexts varies across cultures. Stay tuned!

💭 Even today, in times when empathy between individuals is eroded, trust in institutions is in decay, and norm heterogeneity is unavoidable, a simple strategy like “Look twice, forgive once” offers a hopeful and simple way to restore and maintain cooperation.

📜 Our findings confirm that complex moral norms of judgment or public institutions are not a prerequisite for reputation-based cooperation. The simplicity and robustness of our results suggest that aggregating observations and showing some tolerance may be a very old strategy.

💡 Surprising: More information isn’t always better! Using too many observations makes reputations similar to a Pass/Fail class—where no one is motivated to do more than the bare minimum to "pass". Fewer observations (but more than one) lead to more nuanced judgments.

⚖️ Why it works: One mistake doesn’t define you! By looking at a broader pattern of behavior, one bad action doesn’t automatically lead to a bad reputation. Looking more than once and giving the benefit of the doubt to others resolves disagreements and promotes cooperation.

🔍 Our findings: Observing multiple actions and showing some tolerance allows reputation use to evolve and cooperation to thrive, even when people can disagree on their perception of others (private reputations) or when people follow different social norms.

🤔 Reputations tend to summarize multiple actions—not just one, as previous models assumed—and that might explain their widespread use across cultures. Today, this question is more relevant than ever. With so much info available, how should we use it?

🌍 Previous models suggest that reputations arise only in societies with very specific moral norms or public institutions coordinating opinions. But for an anthropologist like me, those societies are the exception, not the rule. What makes reputations work in all other societies?

📚 Scientists have extensively studied how indirect reciprocity ("you help me, and others will help you") can foster societal cooperation. In indirect reciprocity, individuals use reputations to decide how to act. However, how did the reputations arise in the first place?

🙏 Huge thanks to my incredible collaborators Corina Tarnita, Josh Plotkin (@jplotkin.bsky.social), Mari Kawakatsu (@mkawakatsu.bsky.social), Taylor Kessinger, and Joseph Sartini, for making this happen!