The Paradox of the “Top Specialist” and the Heuristics of Reputation

This chapter contains a critical analysis of people's faith in experts. It presents many biases that influence and distort people's perception of the reputation of others. It also examines the heuristics that influence people's perceptions and lead them to classify accurately or inaccurately a person or object within a social network. Reputation can never be taken for granted and always creates uncertainty and anxiety. This is because social position is always precarious and can never be objectively determined. The chapter also distinguishes the “good” from the “bad” uses of reputation in order to develop a proper epistemology of reputation. The objective is to identify a set of normative and descriptive instruments that can be used to classify the heuristics and establish some sort of criteria, along the lines of the classical epistemological tradition in order to distinguish between the rules of inference that place too much or too little trust in the reputations of others.