Reputation Judgments Research Articles

Fooling Them, Not Me? How Fake News Affects Evaluators’ Reputation Judgments and Behavioral Intentions

The volume of fake news in the digital media landscape is increasing, creating a new threat to organizations’ reputations. At the same time, individuals are more aware of the existence of fake news. It thus remains unclear how fake news affects evaluators’ reputation judgments. In this article, we draw on the distinction between first-order judgments (i.e., an individual evaluator’s reputation judgment) and second-order judgments (i.e., an individual evaluator’s belief about the reputation judgments of other evaluators). We integrate this distinction with insights from communication research and social psychology to theorize how fake news affects reputation judgments and behavioral intentions. Through three experimental studies, we show that the negative effect of fake news is larger for second-order reputation judgments and that this effect is greater for organizations with a positive reputation. Furthermore, our results indicate that although fake news has a smaller effect on first-order judgments, the latter adapt to second-order judgments and thereby affect behavioral intentions. This article contributes, first, to the micro-cognitive perspective on reputation formation by taking the first step in developing a comprehensive understanding of the intricate impact of fake news on reputation and behavioral intentions. Second, this article contributes to our understanding of the role of a good prior reputation as a buffer or a burden.

Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency

We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experiment, we pitted a prosocial act (“Let’s help clean up for Doggie!”) against an instrumental act (“Let’s move these out of our way”). Children in the prosocial condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to protest when another individual was given credit for it. In a second experiment, we replicated the prosocial condition but with a new manipulation: high-cost versus low-cost helping. We manipulated both the language surrounding cost (i.e., “This will be pretty tough to clean up” vs. “It will be really easy to clean this up”) and how difficult the task itself was. As predicted, children in the high-cost condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to take back credit for it. These results suggest that even 4-year-old children make active attempts to elicit positive reputational judgments for their prosocial acts, with cost as a moderating factor.

Destination Reputation Management: The Divergent Role of Tourists’ Word of Mouth in Urban China

This study reveals the influence of word of mouth on destination reputation from the perspective of tourists’ reputation judgment and explores the differentiating effect of judgment dimensions on the degree of consistency between word of mouth and reputation based on multinomial logistic regression analysis, aiming to advance the theoretical exploration of the complex relationship between word of mouth and reputation. This study finds that (1) tourists weigh word-of-mouth information that is identical or different from their views to make reputation judgments, and destination reputation is a systematic emergent outcome of word-of-mouth information that is recursively weighed and judged by tourists in the process of dissemination. (2) Tourists judge the reputation of a destination based on different dimensions, including scenic spots, local food, history and culture, natural environment, social atmosphere, activities and events, and facilities and services. (3) Tourists’ reputation judgment dimensions have a differentiating effect on the influence of word of mouth on destination reputation; that is, there are interpersonal differences in the influence of word of mouth information on destination reputation by tourists based on different dimensions. This paper provides a new perspective and approach to the study of the relationship between word of mouth and destination reputation, which can contribute to destination reputation management and marketing efforts.

Managing bureaucratic reputation in the face of crises: An experimental examination of the effect of strategic communication

AbstractResearch on bureaucratic reputation has found that public organizations respond strategically to reputational threats. To understand better the way public organizations should communicate with their external audiences, upon which they depend for necessary resources and democratic legitimacy, this study examines the effectiveness of various communication strategies that agencies often use in response to a crisis. The results of a series of vignette experiments involving US adults show that an agency's communication strategy in response to crises does indeed influence citizens' reputation judgments. Specifically, compared with remaining silent, organizations that offer the public explanations of crises mitigate their reputational losses more effectively. Further, this study finds that people's prior reputation judgments and the nature of the crisis itself are important factors involved in the formation of reputation judgments, although these findings contradict communication theories. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The role of legitimacy and reputation judgments in users’ selection of service providers on sharing economy platforms

Information systems literature suggests that reputation is the main judgment form that captures user-related information online. Drawing on social judgment literature, we contend that a user's online characteristics and past actions are not all reputation-based, but also legitimacy-based, and that transaction stake determines whether users will use reputation or legitimacy judgment to evaluate other users. Using Airbnb, we show that level of stake in a transaction determines the judgment form (reputation or legitimacy) that guests resort to when evaluating a host. Moreover, we find that providing extensive information on a host to potential guests in low-stake transactions is counterproductive.

A Relational Theory of Reputational Stability and Change

An ongoing discussion in organizational studies has focused on the path-dependent nature of organizational reputation. To date, however, there has been little explanation about when and why some constituents’ reputation judgments remain stable, whereas others are more prone to change. We contribute to this research by developing a relational theory of reputational stability and change. Our fundamental argument is that differences in constituent-organization relationships, as well as in the reputational communities that surround these relationships, affect the stability and change of reputation judgments. First, we highlight three relationship characteristics—favorability, history, and directness—and theorize that the reputation judgments of constituents with more unfavorable, longer, and more direct relationships with an organization are more stable, whereas the reputation judgments of constituents with more favorable, shorter, and more indirect relationships with the organization are less stable. We then develop the concept of reputational communities as a key source of indirect information about organizations. We highlight that the immediacy, size, and level of agreement within reputational communities affect how influential they are in changing individual constituents’ reputation judgments. Specifically, we propose that more immediate and larger reputational communities with a higher level of agreement are most likely to change individual constituents’ reputation judgments, whereas more distant and smaller reputational communities with a lower level of agreement are least likely to do so. Overall, we position constituents’ relationships with an organization and the communities that surround these relationships as central elements for understanding reputational stability and change.

Political YouTube Channel Reputation (PYCR): Development and validation of a multidimensional scale

Although YouTube is driving change in the news and information environment and earning a reputation as an alternative media, there is a lack of research examining what determines people’s reputational judgments on YouTube’s political channels. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 experts and empirical findings from 380 adults, this research identified factors that impact YouTube users’ reputation perception of political channels and developed a scale. The results showed that the Political YouTube Channel Reputation (PYCR) scale comprises four distinctive dimensions: news credibility, political ideology, user-oriented communication, and quality management. The reliability and validity of the scale were assessed, using exploratory and confirmatory analyses and construct validity. The PYCR scale has a variety of potential applications for users, political influencers, and YouTube, and it can serve as a theoretical framework for future empirical research in this novel and emerging area.

Caught up or Protected by the Past? How Reputational Histories Matter for Agencies’ Media Reputations

Abstract Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational histories increase the likelihood of receiving positive or negative newspaper coverage. Our findings are based on an extensive coding of 11,041 newspaper articles over a 10-year period in Denmark and Flanders (Belgium) regarding 40 agencies. We introduce a measure of reputational history from communication studies. The analysis identifies that both negative and positive reputational histories are related to the valence of newspaper coverage, suggesting that the past reputations of agencies are part of the cognitive basis upon which audiences form reputational judgment.

Advancing reputation measurement: evolving toward improved quantitative assessments

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the information-gathering deficits in contemporary reputation measurement that are rooted in sampling and to obtain supporting information from respondents from various stakeholder groups. Design/methodology/approach In regard to social emergence theory, the authors examine the common practice of aggregating reputational judgments from randomly sampled respondents without considering their knowledge domains. A stereotyping experiment conducted in three countries provides evidence that lower-level reputations might vary, whereas higher-level reputations resulting from the social emergence process do not vary. Findings The findings demonstrate that researchers should consider respondents’ heterogeneity in regard to reputation measurement. Stakeholder judgments divergent from their domains of expertise often add noise, instead of informative answers, to the reputational categories. Research limitations/implications The social emergence process, in addition to the roles of the stakeholders, their interaction structures and the timing of their communication, needs to be incorporated into an improved reputation measurement method. Practical implications Not all information from the same respondent should be considered when computing a final reputation score. Respondents’ heterogeneity is revealed to be fundamental for reputational assessments. Originality/value This study is original in its examination of the validity of reputation assessment being restricted to lower-level descriptions of the supervenience relation. Building upon the results of the experiment conducted in three national framings, this paper suggests ways to improve reputation measurement.

Measuring bureaucratic reputation: Scale development and validation

Despite growing interest in bureaucratic reputation as a theoretical construct, the field lacks a standardized measure that can be used in surveys to capture individual‐level variation in the reputation judgments of citizens and other audiences. The aim of this article, therefore, is to develop a standardized, individual‐level measure of bureaucratic reputation based on the conceptual definition provided by Carpenter (). Employing feedback from experts and data from a survey of over 300 U.S. citizens, this article develops and tests a unidimensional scale of bureaucratic reputation, representing the content domains of performance, morality, procedural fairness, technical competence, and general reputation. Results suggest that our proposed bureaucratic reputation scale (BRS) has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with support for autonomy, budget, and power, which provides evidence of criterion validity. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic reputation are discussed.

Bureaucratic reputation in the eyes of citizens: an analysis of US federal agencies

Bureaucratic reputation has been defined as a set of beliefs about a public organization’s capacities, roles, and obligations that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences (Carpenter, 2010). Although one of the most important audiences in a democracy is the citizenry, very little empirical investigation has looked at citizens’ beliefs about specific government agencies and what individual or contextual factors influence these beliefs. To examine this question, this study analyzes data from a unique 2013 Pew Political Survey that represents the responses of 1500 US citizens on the reputations of 12 federal agencies. Results demonstrate that citizens view the reputations of some agencies (such as the CDC and NASA) much more favorably than other agencies (such as the IRS and the Department of Education). In regression analyses, findings suggest that the reputation of federal agencies varies according to citizens’ general level of trust in government and their political ideology, but that demographic, socioeconomic and regional differences also shape reputation judgments. These findings provide some preliminary empirical understanding of the reputation of government agencies in the eyes of the citizenry and may have implications for agencies seeking to manage their relationship with the public.Points for practitionersBureaucratic reputation has important implications for public administrators because of its influence on a government agency’s autonomy, power, and legitimacy. Our study examines the reputations of 12 US federal government agencies and identifies individual and contextual determinants of citizens’ reputation ratings. We demonstrate that reputations differ between agencies and that certain factors – especially political ideology and trust in government – shape how the public views an agency’s reputation. These findings can help practitioners understand better how to strategically manage their agency’s reputation given an increasingly critical citizenry.

Dimensions of Altruism: Do Evaluations of Prosocial Behavior Track Social Good or Personal Sacrifice?

Do we praise altruistic acts because they produce social benefits or because they entail a personal sacrifice? Across five studies, we find that people mainly rely on personal cost rather than social benefit when evaluating prosocial actors. This occurs because sacrifice, but not benefit, is taken as a signal of moral character and an input to reputational judgments (Studies 1 and 2). We tested three possible boundary conditions, finding that the effects are similar for actions that benefit the in-group versus the out-group (Study 3), but that people do account for social effectiveness when evaluating donations of time (Study 4) and when high-cost but ineffective acts are pitted directly against low-cost but effective acts in joint evaluation (Study 5). We argue that these results have far-reaching implications for the psychology and philosophy of altruism, as well as practical import for charitable giving, particularly the effective altruism movement.

Who to ask for help? Do dogs form an opinion on humans based on skilfulness?

Reputation is considered a fundamental mechanism for cooperation. Dogs can use their direct experience to form reputation judgments about humans that are either nice or not towards others, however it is unknown if dogs can take skilfulness into account when requesting human help. Here, we investigated reputation formation based on human skilfulness. In study 1, 32 adult pet dogs witnessed four blocks of two demonstration types: a skilful experimenter succeeded in solving a puzzle and obtaining food for the dog, while an unskilful experimenter failed. Each block was followed by an unsolvable task trial, where the dogs were presented a container baited with food that was inaccessible to the dog. During the task, the experimenters stood on either side of the container. Referential looks towards each experimenter were recorded. Dogs did not choose the skilful experimenter above chance and did not prefer the skilful experimenter over the unskilful one. In order to simplify the task and avoid carryover effects, in a second study dogs only witnessed one type of demonstration and were then tested in a single unsolvable task trial. To further simplify the demonstrations, the experimenter either skilfully helped the dog (skilful demonstration), or did not help the dog at all (no-help demonstration). Forty-eight dogs were allocated to one of four demonstration groups: demonstrations could be either skilful or with no-help (“skilfulness” variable) and nice or ignoring (“quality of interaction” variable). Dogs’ looking back behaviour did not differ in any of the conditions. However, when pooling the “quality of interaction” groups to compare the two “skilfulness” groups, a trend towards significance was observed between the duration of looking in the skilful group and the non-helpful group (Wilcoxon signed rank test: Mdnskilful=9.20, interquartile range 3.98–20.65; Mdnno-help=4.90 interquartile range 1.35–8.58, T=1.93, p=0.05, r=−0.39). The results should be considered cautiously and cannot confirm that dogs could take skilfulness into account when looking referentially at humans for help, or use the information to evaluate them in this specific context.

Reputation and identity conflict in management consulting

Based on a case study of a large consulting firm, this article makes two contributions to the literature on reputation and identity by examining how an organization responds when its identity is substantially misaligned with the experience and perceptions of external stakeholders that form the basis of reputational judgments. First, rather than triggering some form of identity adaptation, it outlines how other forms of identity can come into play to remediate this gap, buffering the organization’s identity from change. This shift to other individual identities is facilitated by a low organizational identity context even when the identity of the firm is coherent and strong. The second contribution concerns the conceptualization of consulting and other professional service firms. We explain how reputation and identity interact in the context of the distinctive organizational features of these firms. Notably, their loosely coupled structure and the central importance of expert knowledge claims enable individual consultants both to reinforce and supplement corporate reputation via individual identity work.

Social Influence on Corporate Reputation: Comparing Judgments of CSR to Judgments of Capabilities

In this article we aim to build on an emergent literature that recognizes a corporate reputation as an aggregation of individual reputation judgments. We apply theory from social influence from soc...

Ambivalence and Reputation Stability: An Experimental Investigation on the Effects of New Information

This paper explores how the degree of underlying ambivalence toward a certain organization influences the stability of people’s reputation judgments when new information is provided as well as how this information, in turn, influences people’s sense of ambivalence. Results from one experiment demonstrate that individuals who are highly ambivalent toward an organization display a greater amount of change in reputational judgments when exposed to new information (either positive or negative) compared with those who are less ambivalent. The results also indicate that ambivalence scores change significantly after people are exposed to new information, suggesting that people use new information to diminish their sense of ambivalence when possible. Taken together, the results of the study suggest novel theoretical and practical implications for reputation management.

The Effects of a Social Context on Reputational Judgments of Corporate Social Responsibility

The Effects of a Social Context on Reputational Judgments of Corporate Social Responsibility

Does familiarity breed stability? The role of familiarity in moderating the effects of new information on reputation judgments

This paper clarifies how familiarity with an organization moderates the effect of new information on the stability of people's reputation judgments about the organization. Although extant literature suggests the possibility of contrasting predictions, results from two experiments lend support for the hypothesis that familiarity mitigates the impact of both positive and negative information. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reputation stability and to a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of being known.

Neural correlates of gender differences in reputation building.

Gender differences in cooperative choices and their neural correlates were investigated in a situation where reputation represented a crucial issue. Males and females were involved in an economic exchange (trust game) where economic and reputational payoffs had to be balanced in order to increase personal welfare. At the behavioral level, females showed a stronger reaction to negative reputation judgments that led to higher cooperation than males, measured by back transfers in the game. The neuroanatomical counterpart of this gender difference was found within the reward network (engaged in producing expectations of positive results) and reputation-related brain networks, such as the self-control network (engaged in strategically resisting the temptation to defect) and the mentalizing network (engaged in thinking about how one is viewed by others), in which the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the medial (M)PFC respectively play a crucial role. Furthermore, both DLPFC and MPFC activity correlated with the amount of back transfer, as well as with the personality dimensions assessed with the Big-Five Questionnaire (BFQ-2). Males, according to their greater DLPFC recruitment and their higher level of the BFQ-2 subscale of Dominance, were more focused on implementing a profit-maximizing strategy, pursuing this target irrespectively of others' judgments. On the contrary, females, according to their greater MPFC activity and their lower level of Dominance, were more focused on the reputation per se and not on the strategic component of reputation building. These findings shed light on the sexual dimorphism related to cooperative behavior and its neural correlates.

Experimental Research in Institutional Theory

This symposium builds on our 2012 AOM symposium on experiments in institutional theory where experimental research has been presented as a promising direction complementing and diversifying the existing methodological toolkit of institutional analysts. We seek to draw the researchers’ interest to empirical exploration of micro foundations of institutions and institutional processes using experimental methods. Following Meyer and Rowan (1977), many authors have encouraged the greater use of experimental designs in institutional research (Bitektine, 2011; Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2008; David & Bitektine, 2009; David, Sine, & Haveman, forthcoming; Green, 2004; Kennedy & Fiss, 2009; Suchman, 1995; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012; Voronov & Vince, 2012). The pro-posed symposium thus represents one of the first steps towards implementation of this research agenda. How Does New Information Affect Reputation Judgments? The Role of Familiarity Presenter: Simone Mariconda; U. della Svizzera Italiana Presenter: Francesco Lurati; U. of Lugano Being more Legitimate (and Different) with Less? Corporate Giving versus Corporate Volunteering Presenter: Heiko Breitsohl; U. Wuppertal The Effects of Institutional Complexity on Creative Cognition Presenter: Rachel Ruttan; Northwestern U. Presenter: Michael Mauskapf; Northwestern U. Presenter: Loran F. Nordgren; Northwestern U. Individual Reactions to Institutional Complexity Presenter: Vern Glaser; U. of Southern California Presenter: Sandy E. Green; California State U., Northridge Presenter: Nathanael J. Fast; U. of Southern California