# Personality and Reputation: A Complex Relationship in Virtual Environments
## 4 Discussion
Individuals characterized by high Openness resulted to offer lower stakes to well-reputed responders, as well as to accept less frequently proposals coming from well-reputed opponents. They also appeared to ignore the proposers' reputation in their rating decision-making process (i.e., they rated independently from proposers' reputation). Literature predictions regarding the relationship between Conscientiousness and reputation susceptibility resulted mainly unconfirmed. Since conscientious individuals are known to be task-oriented and goal-directed [48], the explanation could be found in the UG framework itself (i.e., strategic self-interested framework). In our game, reputation was not directly affecting the UG dynamics and the absence of reputation susceptibility showed by individuals with high Conscientiousness can be considered as actually not in conflict with the previous findings. Nevertheless, in the rating phase Conscientious individuals actively enhance the social norm (i.e., reputation) providing more positive evaluation towards already well-reputed proposers. In this case, results appeared to confirm the expected tendency of conscientious subjects to promote the group or local norms. For what concerns literature-based expectations regarding the trait of Social Dominance Orientation and reputation susceptibility, they were partially not confirmed. In fact, we expected high-SDO individuals to be equally fair to all targets, or at least to be more generous with well-reputed responders [26; 49]. Nevertheless, in our experiment, we found that the high-SDO individuals offered smaller stakes to well-reputed responders, while they were not affected by proposers' reputation when deciding whether accept or not the received offer. Instead, the tendency of high-SDO individuals to be sensitive to proposers' reputation emerged as in line with their group-based hierarchy preference [50]. Our study did not confirm literature predictions about the reputation sensitivity related to the trait of Agreeableness. Indeed, within our computer-mediated environment, high Agreeableness individuals did not act more pro-socially. A possible explanation for this result can be identified in the link between self-reported Agreeableness and social desirability (i.e., the desire to manage social impressions) [51]. Because of deindividuation dynamics [32], in an environment where offers are completely anonymous, the relationship between Agreeableness and pro-social behaviors could be inconsistent [52]. Interestingly, in the acceptance phase of our game, responders with a high Agreeableness tended to prefer allocations coming from bad-reputed proposers. This finding seems to confirm the claim of [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [53], who highlighted, in an online study, how high-Agreeable individuals overlooked the risk of proposers' negative behaviors. Moreover, high-Agreeableness individuals evaluated more positively proposers with a bad reputation. In this sense, their evaluation could be explained with what reported by [PERSON] et al. [54] regarding the tendency of high-Agreeableness individuals to evaluate more positively stigmatized social groups. Apart from our results, it appears that more efforts are required to fully understand how Agreeableness trait influences the subjects' interpretation and perception of online social norms (i.e., reputation). Finally, no relationship between Extraversion and Neuroticism traits with the reputation has been found in our study, probably because of the effects of deindividuation in online environments. In conclusion, our work examined how reputation could affect online behaviors (e.g., donation, acceptance, and rating), in relation to the psychological traits of the individuals. Despite in our online version of the Ultimatum Game the reputation was not influencing the game dynamics directly, people actually relied much on their opponents' reputation in the decision making processes.