Imagine you’re at a party, and there are two people who want to make a good impression. One person is drawn to the positive qualities of others and naturally wants to cooperate with them. The other person feels pressured by societal norms to associate with ‘good’ individuals. This article explores how reputation systems can create either a ‘pull’ or ‘push’ incentive for people to reward positive reputations. By examining the psychology and behavior behind these different mechanisms, we can better understand how reputation influences our actions. This framework also sheds light on previous studies on reputation and offers suggestions on how we can utilize reputation systems for the greater social good. Discover more about this fascinating topic by exploring the underlying research!

Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize ‘actors’ to take reputation-enhancing actions, and ‘evaluators’ to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation framework that centers the perspective of evaluators by suggesting that reputation systems can create two fundamentally different incentives for evaluators to reward positive reputations. Evaluators may be pulled towards ‘good’ actors to benefit directly from their reciprocal cooperation, or pushed to cooperate with such actors by normative pressure. I discuss how psychology and behavior might diverge under pull versus push mechanisms, and use this framework to deepen our understanding of the empirical reputation literature and suggest ways that we may better leverage reputation for social good.

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