Group-based reputational incentives can blunt sensitivity to societal harms and benefits.

Abstract

People's concern with maintaining their individual reputation powerfully drives judgment and decision making. But humans also identify strongly with groups. Concerns about group-based reputation may similarly shape people's psychology, perhaps especially in contexts where shifts in group reputation can have strategic consequences. Do individuals allow their concern with their group's reputation to shape their reactions to even large-scale societal suffering versus benefits? Examining both affective responses and financially incentivized behavior of partisans in the United States, five preregistered experiments (N = 7,534) demonstrate that group-based reputational incentives can weaken-and sometimes nearly eliminate-affective differentiation between present-term societal harms and benefits. This can occur even when these societal harms and benefits are substantial-including economic devastation and national security threats-and when the consequences impact ingroup members. Individuals' sensitivity to group-based reputation can even cause them to divert resources from more effective to less effective charities. We provide evidence that partisans care about group-based reputation in part because it holds strategic value, positioning their group to improve its standing vis-a-vis the outgroup. By allowing group-based reputational incentives to reduce their sensitivity to societal outcomes, partisans may play into the other side's cynical narratives about their disregard for human suffering, damaging bridges to cooperation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).