Group-Based Reputational Incentives Can Blunt Sensitivity to Societal Harms and Benefits

People's concern with maintaining their individual reputation powerfully drives judgment and decision making. But humans also identify strongly with groups. Concerns about group-based reputation may similarly shape people's psychology, perhaps especially in contexts where shifts in group reputation can have strategic consequences. Do individuals allow their concern with their group's reputation to shape their reactions to even large-scale societal suffering versus benefits? Examining both affective responses and financially incentivized behavior of partisans in the United States, five preregistered experiments (N = 7,534) demonstrate that group-based reputational incentives can weaken-and sometimes nearly eliminate-affective differentiation between present-term societal harms and benefits. This can occur even when these societal harms and benefits are substantial-including economic devastation and national security threats-and when the consequences impact ingroup members. Individuals' sensitivity to group-based reputation can even cause them to divert resources from more effective to less effective charities. We provide evidence that partisans care about group-based reputation in part because it holds strategic value, positioning their group to improve its standing vis-a-vis the outgroup. By allowing group-based reputational incentives to reduce their sensitivity to societal outcomes, partisans may play into the other side's cynical narratives about their disregard for human suffering, damaging bridges to cooperation. Public Significance Statement When groups get locked into competition, they can become highly focused on outcompeting the other side, with costly societal ramifications. In the context of Democrats and Republicans in the United States, we find that partisans are sometimes so attentive to how events make their group look vis-a-vis the outgroup (i.e., their group-based reputation) that they become less sensitive to how events impinge on present-term societal harms and benefits. This can include economic devastation, national security threats, and health care emergencies that harm the ingroup. This occurs at least partly because group-based reputational incentives hold strategic value for gaining power. Concerns with group-based reputation can even cause individuals to act in ways that bring about suboptimal societal impact if doing so avoids burnishing the outgroup's reputation. When two sides are focused on looking good rather than seeking good, prospects for cooperation diminish.