Reputation to understand society

The introduction to the CMOT special issue with papers from ICORE 2011 is out! Yay!

Read the introduction here

This is how it starts:

Reputation is commonly defined as “the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone” . As such, reputation is the prototypical representative of social artifacts that we use to make sense out of social complexity. It shares with norms, responsibility, power, and trust – to cite our own favorite examples – the characteristic of making sense only in a social context. Reputation places itself in the most abstract position among these social artifacts.
Why is it so? Because when properly defined, reputation loosely connects with the object-level actions of the individual. First, in order to distinguish reputation in the proper sense, one must refer to some kind of majority rule – since it must be “generally held”. Second, reputation needs a model where the agent that elaborates and reasons on it must be endowed with a mind able to hold different levels of beliefs, since this agent must not confuse reputation with experience or evaluation. Third, while norms, power, trust and responsibility have all more or less direct connection to an action at the object level – violate or punish, exert, perform an uncertain transaction, gain attribute for an event – reputation only connects directly with the action of gossiping.

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