The Morality Map: Does living in a smaller community cause greater concern for moral reputation?

Abstract

Small rural communities differ in social visibility compared to large urban cities due to their interconnected social networks. We hypothesized the higher social visibility of rural communities would cause members to see their reputations as more vulnerable and make them more concerned about protecting their reputations than people in cities. An online experiment (N=198) found imagining being in a small rural community with high social visibility caused people to report more concern for reputation and resist risking their reputation by price gouging, compared to those who imagined living in a large anonymous urban community. A cross-sectional analysis of the World Values Survey (N=119,745) revealed a small but significant correlation between living in smaller communities and having more concern for one's reputation. This work has implications for understanding how cultural and moral differences across regions might arise from geographic features of those regions.