The reputation bubble

We can’t study every person from scratch each time. So we keep shortened models:

reliable;

funny;

dangerous;

competent;

always late;

a good listener.

Reputation saves time. It helps you pick a doctor, a contractor, an employee and the person you can leave a key with.

But a model tends to confirm itself.

The “clown” is expected to joke, and his serious thought goes unnoticed. The “clever one” is forgiven a bad joke as subtle irony. Someone with a reputation as a troublemaker is blamed before anyone checks.

A stable group hands out roles. Sometimes a minor early episode decides who a person will remain in the group’s eyes. He starts living up to expectations, because everyone else rewards familiar behaviour and ignores anything new.

It doesn’t follow that personality is entirely invented by the group. The same person really does behave differently in different settings, because he is given different opportunities and different feedback.

Changing groups is sometimes liberating. The old label is left without anyone to carry it, and the new environment hasn’t yet decided who we are.

When joining a group, it helps to watch the first repetitions:

• what obligations you take on;
• what behaviour you tolerate;
• what people come to you for;
• what you do especially well;
• how you react when a boundary is crossed.

Reputation starts working once observations have accumulated. It can protect you, open doors and reduce the need to prove your competence every time.

Living purely off reputational capital, though, is risky. A skunk may one day turn out to have no smell, and a bear may have a head cold.

A role is assigned faster than it seems. Someone who helped a colleague with a spreadsheet in his first week gets all the department’s spreadsheets six months later, and two years later hears at his review that he is “technical, not a people person”. Nobody made that decision: people simply came to him with the same thing and he didn’t refuse. At the review it sounds like a description of his character, though it describes a history of requests and not one of his own decisions.

That is why the first weeks in a new job cost more than the months that follow: they cheaply establish what will then take years to disprove. Saying no the third time is noticeably harder than the first.