The network interpretation of reputation advanced in this book depicts the everyday flow and storage of information about a person throughout the extensive lifelong network of all of those other individuals who have come to know that person. This demonstration of the underlying components and development of a person’s reputation affords examination of such issues as truth in reputation, how persons are both the agent and resultant of their reputations, the mutual relevance of reputation and personality, the psychological structure of libel law, and three distinct stages in the evolution of a p ... More

The network interpretation of reputation advanced in this book depicts the everyday flow and storage of information about a person throughout the extensive lifelong network of all of those other individuals who have come to know that person. This demonstration of the underlying components and development of a person’s reputation affords examination of such issues as truth in reputation, how persons are both the agent and resultant of their reputations, the mutual relevance of reputation and personality, the psychological structure of libel law, and three distinct stages in the evolution of a person’s posthumous reputation network. The explicit network approach provides guidance for addressing such questions as How can we estimate the total membership size of a person’s lifelong reputational community? What adaptive social functions does gossip serve? What does the libel court of London teach us about the risks of communicating information about specific other persons and of defaming and being defamed? What changes occur in the flow of information about persons upon their death? This integrative network conception of reputation brings together a wide range of subfields in the social sciences and humanities into a coherent framework. They include biographical studies, cultural history, evolutionary psychology, gossip research, libel law, organizational psychology, personality assessment, publicity and public relations, social cognition, social network analysis, and social representation theory. The comprehensiveness of the network interpretation of reputation spotlights new forms of interdisciplinary analysis and shows how scholars and scientists in a broad array of disciplines have something important to contribute.