Reputation by Origgi Gloria

Author:Origgi, Gloria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6. Selfie of the author with Tim Berners-Lee. Photograph by Gloria Origgi.

Inferring the social prominence of someone after seeing them in the proximity of a famous person can at times be rational. The occasional soundness of such an inference helps explain the favorable impact of this photograph on my reputation. Yet the heuristics of proximity are not consistently or even usually reliable. I can find myself near an important person by sheer chance, because we are traveling on the same train or dining in the same restaurant, and in such cases the observable association is entirely contingent and transient. As a factual matter, visible proximity, be it physical or virtual, between two people who have different social statuses is systematically interpreted as giving more information than it actually does. Simply being next to each other is perceived, often quite erroneously, as a robust association that affects the reputation of both.

A good example of a relation of virtual proximity, one behind chronically manipulated distortions of scholarly and scientific reputation, is the practice of coauthoring books and articles. In an environment that feeds on reputation such as the academic one, arguments over the order of names in publications can lead to heated disputes. We know well that our prestige will be magnified by coauthoring an article or book with a famous researcher, while publication with unknowns will weaken it. This is why an infinite series of norms has been developed to establish the order of authorship (alphabetical? order of importance?). It also explains epic battles to obtain a dominant position in the list of authors as well as the practice, common in some disciplines, of including the name of the director of the laboratory in all publications, even if he or she contributed to the research only administratively and not at all by way of content. Because the director will be an older and more established researcher, the presence of his or her name will typically raise the prestige of the publication and thereby improve the reputation of the young researchers who actually did the work. Moreover, the prestige of the director will increase with each new publication, along with that of the laboratory, in a virtuous circle of cumulative advantages whose dynamics we will analyze in chapter 9, dedicated to academic prestige.

Relations of proximity are ruled by norms that need to be learned and that vary from one context to another. To be seated next to Tim Berners-Lee on a train doesn’t have the same meaning as being photographed next to him or to work at his side in a research lab. A “naïve” reading of such relations is one of the main causes of distortions in the attribution of reputation. Moreover, the proximity bias is easily manipulated. This is obvious in the case of marketing campaigns that associate a perfume with a movie star. The epistemic strategy through which we can defend ourselves against our natural vulnerability to such distortions consists in asking ourselves each time if we are justified in interpreting proximity as conclusive evidence of a genuine social relation.

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