# Personality and Reputation: A Complex Relationship in Virtual Environments
## 4 Discussion  
The main interest of this study was to investigate the peoples' susceptibility to reputation in the online environment, through a modified version of the Ultimatum Game. Overall, our work sheds light on the mediation role played by the psychological variables on the relationship between online reputation and UG behaviors. Through the exploration of the players' behavior and their tendency to positively or negatively rate their opponents, our findings showed that reputation could affect people's online social decision making (i.e., donation, acceptance and rating behaviors). In particular, in accordance with the literature, acceptance was more likely when facing well-reputed proposers [33], in fact equally fair players (i.e., that exhibited the same offer to the responders) were evaluated differently according to their reputational rating [39]. Furthermore, well-rated responders received more generous offers. In this sense, the simple fact to assign a good reputation to an opponent appeared to be sufficient to prompt individuals to reward them with higher offers. This evidence is in line with previous findings and extends to a slightly different domain and under other circumstances, the results coming from public good games literature [45]. For what concerns the offers made by \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{5}{c}{**Reputation Susceptibility Effects on Rating Dynamics in the Ultimatum Game**} \\ \hline  & _Akaike_ & F & **Df-1(2)** & **Model Precision** \\ \hline Best Model & 3331.810 & 111.330 *** & 6(3217) & 75.3\% \\ \hline \multicolumn{5}{c}{**Fixed effects**} \\ \hline
**Factor** & **F** & **Df-1(2)** & **Coefficient (\(\beta\))** & **Student \(t\)** \\ \hline Offer & 652.285 *** & 1(3217) & 0.458 & 25.540 *** \\ Offer \({}^{*}\) Proposer Reputation (PR) & 4.677 ** & 1(3217) & 0.013 & 2.163 ** \\ Conscientiousness \({}^{*}\) (PR) & 8.289 *** & 1(3217) & 0.019 & 2.879 *** \\ Agreeableness \({}^{*}\) (PR) & 6.961 *** & 1(3217) & \(-\)0.021 & \(-\)2.638 *** \\ State Anxiety \({}^{*}\) (PR) & 16.502 *** & 1(3217) & \(-\)0.004 & \(-\)4.062 *** \\ Social Dominance Orientation \({}^{*}\) (PR) & 10.405 *** & 1(3217) & 0.004 & 3.226 *** \\ \hline \multicolumn{5}{c}{*** = \(p\) < 0.001; *** = \(p\) < 0.05. Note: * = Interaction with.} \\ \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: Generalised Linear Mixed Models 3. Effects of Reputation and “Reputation Susceptibility” on the Rating Phase. our participants, we observed gender differences, with the males acting fairer than the females. Despite recent works suggesting that women are in general more altruistic than men in the Dictator game [46], our results appeared to be in line with a recent work of [PERSON] et al. [47] concerning adolescents, in which the presence of a reputational system in a Bargaining Game, induced males to be more generous than females. Thus, one could hypothesize that such differences can be attributed to distinct susceptibility to the reputation of males and females, even if only in allocation tasks. The central aspect of our findings relates to the role of psychological variables in mediating the relationship between reputation and UG behaviors. As reported in Table 7, we compared the expected effects of reputation susceptibility of psychological variables derived from the literature with those obtained in our study. As regards Anxiety trait, literature predictions were fully confirmed. In fact, high-Anxious individuals appeared less susceptible to the normative influence of reputation. On the one hand, they did not offer, on average, different amounts towards individuals with good or bad reputation; on the other, they accepted less frequently the offers coming from well-rated proposers. Moreover, the high-Anxious participants seemed to be less prone to reward well-rated proposers with positive feedback. As regards Openness trait, it was confirmed as a factor that can hinder compliance with social norms.