Perceiving personality through the grapevine: A network approach to reputations

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Network Science
• Interpersonal Perception

Background:

• Reputations are crucial for social interactions, enabling information sharing about individuals. They can be formed through direct experience or hearsay.
• Existing research often focuses on direct perceptions, with less understanding of how reputations form and function within social networks via indirect information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the consensus, accuracy, positivity bias, and consequences of personality trait information transmitted through hearsay.
• To integrate network science with interpersonal perception to study reputation formation.
• To examine factors influencing hearsay-based reputations, including perceiver characteristics and communication context.

Main Methods:

• Two preregistered studies with 260 and 369 participants created laboratory micronetworks for naturalistic interaction.
• Participants described each other to naive third parties, creating hearsay-based reputations.
• The extended Social Accuracy Model and a domain-wise correlational approach were utilized.

Main Results:

• Hearsay reputations exhibited similar positivity bias to direct reputations.
• Strong consensus was found between hearsay and direct reputations, but accuracy was modest, indicating potential consolidation around inaccuracies.
• Perceivers' extraversion correlated with more biased hearsay reputations; communication context had no significant impact.

Conclusions:

• Hearsay reputations are consequential, influencing judgments of leadership and friendship suitability.
• The findings highlight the importance of studying reputations within network structures.
• Open materials and software are provided to encourage further research on reputations-as-networks.