# Fairness and Trust in Virtual Environments: The Effects of Reputation
## 6 Discussion
Although in the last few years the importance of reputation in supporting fairness and trust has been widely acknowledged (see [5; 43] for two recently published reviews on the topic), the importance of individual factors, like age and gender, in reputation-mediated social interactions deserves more attention. The ontogeny of fairness and trust has received growing attention in recent years [44; 45], and reputation management abilities appear relatively early in ontogeny [46], but less is known about the transition from adolescence into adulthood. During this period, two elements become characteristics in adolescents' behavior: the susceptibility to peer influence and the sensitivity to peer rejection, both mediated by reputation. Social approval and positive reputation might affect the development of self-processes, and perceived support from others can protect adolescents from stress and anxiety [47]. A growing body of research shows the existence of a link between reputation management and delinquency in adolescence [48], with adolescents actively engaging in the acquisition of a non-conforming social reputation. The search for social approval could explain why adolescents became unfairer when playing as Donors in the Reputation Treatment, but it could also explain why they were cautious with reputational information. Reputation is a safeguard against ostracism [49] but it also functions as a way of attaining higher status within the peer's group [48]. Adolescent behavior is motivated by social goals and purposeful reputation-enhancing strategies [50], because acquiring a reputation has also implications for how an adolescent regards herself. In such a context, adolescents in our game paid more attention to their partners' reputations, consistently avoiding asking untrustworthy Observers, but they also achieved a lower level of reputation overall. Our results highlight the importance of reputation and status during adolescence, showing that these concerns orient individuals' behaviors also in the lab. Further research is needed to understand the extent to which age interacts with the environment (competitive and cooperative), or with self-presentation issues which were ruled out by anonymity in the lab. Another promising direction of research is on gender differences in fairness and trust-related behaviors, as in our study. The evidence on the topic is inconclusive, partially because different kinds of social preferences can explain it. Some studies suggested that women are more prosocial than men (e.g., [51; 52]), but in a review paper by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [53] the inconsistencies between studies reporting opposite effects, or even no gender effects are revealed. The emergence of gender differences in social dilemmas could be mediated by a set of contextual factors [54], like mixed-sex vs. same sex dilemmas. Recent works reignited the debate by suggesting that women are more altruistic than men in the Dictator game [55; 56]. Women are expected to behave more pro-socially than men and this may drive their allocation behavior. Nevertheless, in our work no gender effect was detected regarding fairness. In our study, women were more inclined to follow the Observers' suggestions, thus showing higher levels of trust (i.e., following actions). However, such behaviour of women could be differently interpreted, for example, by a lack of self-confidence or a greater tendency to pay more attention to the others' suggestions culturally promoted. Interestingly, women seemed to show better reputation management skills, gaining a more positive reputation during the game, even if previous research had reported different results [34]. In any case, the effect of gender does not seem to be too strong in ours experiments. To conclude, our results illustrate that reputational concerns may promote pro-social choices even indirectly, and in ambiguous and noisy (i.e., virtual) environments, but also that fairness and trust are mediated within virtual environments and social dilemmas games by reputation.