Date: 15th May 2018, 4PM

Venue: HAS CSS RECENS, Meeting Room

Address: H-1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán street 4. T building 1st Floor Room 40.

Abstract: 

Language and networks for reputation-based cooperation

From The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, to products' reviews on eBay, or to recommendations on TripAdvisor, we are immersed in a network of evaluations about individuals, places, goods, firms and institutions. The ensuing reputations are meant to help us understand an individual’s qualities or predict their behaviour, on the basis of their underlying nature (Tennie, Frith, Frith, 2010) or their past actions (Dafoe, Renshon, Huth, 2014). Although reputation can have a tenuous connection to reality, it has been advocated as an effective and inexpensive instrument of social control in human societies (Alexander, 1987; Gluckman, 1963).

One of the crucial tenets of many theories of reputation is that the stability of cooperation is conditional on the fact that reputation can track behaviour with the same accuracy of direct experience (Nowak, Sigmund, 2005; Roberts, 2008). Unfortunately, direct experience is seldom available, and reputations emerge not from what we do, but from people talking about what we do (Burt, 2008; Giardini, Conte, 2012). This has two main implications: first, reputation depends on language that can be manipulated according to the goals of the speaker. Second, reputation is a relational phenomenon that results from a triadic interaction between an evaluator, a target and a recipient who are part of a larger social context.

In this talk, I will present my work on reputation, focusing on two important aspects of it: the role of language and its manipulation, and the role of the network structure.  First, I will argue that in the human language-mediated reputational system, reputations are continuously constructed and reconstructed. Reputation is not the result of a single behavior, and opaqueness and uncertainty in transmission should be taken into account for a better understanding of the way in which reputation can be used to support cooperation in groups, communities and organizations. Second, I will discuss lab experiments and agent-based simulation studies indicating that dynamic transmission of incomplete knowledge, like in human gossip, can support cooperation, but only under specific conditions.

Short bio. Francesca Giardini is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. After getting her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena (IT), she was a postdoc at the National Research Council of Italy in Rome and at the Central European University in Budapest. She uses theoretical analysis, agent-based simulation and lab experiments in order to investigate social sustainability and to identify the contributions of reputation and gossip to cooperation in different settings.