Dave Munger reviews a study of an experiment in reputation-building:
It turns out that your reputation for cooperativeness is only affected by your behavior if you're already popular. If you're not popular, it appears that no one takes notice of your behavior, so it has no impact on your reputation. People with lots of social connections can build a good reputation -- or a bad one -- with much more ease than people with few social connections.
The review is interesting, as is the original study, by Anderson and Shirako (doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.320).
UPDATE (2008/07/07): Broken link fixed.
