Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Reputation damage is invisible
The common advice
The common advice about attacks on a reputation is to rise above the fray. Palmer Luckey rejects it, because an untrue story forecloses future opportunities, and nobody tells the victim that is why.
How the harm hides
Suppose someone lets an unfair story spread, and two years later asks for a meeting with a person who believes it. That person will not announce that the reputation is the reason. They will invent another reason, and the person asking will never know.
Guarding a reputation
Because the harm is invisible, the only protection is to guard a reputation and fight back against attacks on it. Benjamin Franklin did the same 250 years ago: he nurtured his reputation, protected it, and fought back to defend it.
Why do false stories outlive their corrections?
Psychologists call this the continued influence effect. In a 1994 study, Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert had people read a report about a warehouse fire and told them partway through that the first stated cause was wrong. Readers still used the discredited cause when explaining later events. A 2012 review by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues found that corrections reduce the effect but rarely erase it.
How did Franklin protect his reputation?
Franklin's Autobiography says he took care to appear industrious as a young printer in Philadelphia, even wheeling paper through the streets in a barrow. He also kept a list of thirteen virtues that he tracked in a notebook. Franklin later wrote that his reputation for honesty helped him win public printing contracts.
Why do people hide the real reason for no?
People often give a polite reason instead of the true one, a habit sociologist Erving Goffman studied under the name face-work. He described it as the effort people make to keep themselves and others from being embarrassed in a conversation. Turning someone down by citing a scheduling problem rather than a judgment is one everyday form of it. Goffman laid out the idea in a 1955 essay in the journal Psychiatry.
More from David Senra
