Everyday Canvas

Character and Reputation

Prompt: To what degree are character and reputation related? Your thoughts…

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An old English proverb says, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.” My take on it is that it is very difficult to get rid of a bad reputation. Still, a reputation is an up and down thing.

On the other hand, once fully developed, a person’s character does not change. While a person may adapt to his surrounding conditions, his basic character stays the same. A person's character is the complex interwoven mental qualities, moral beliefs, and behavior in him.The character of a person determines how he responds to situations in life regardless of success or failure and applause or scorn.

As to the relationship of reputation and character, with reputation, names have some weight. If you call someone a good name, he’ll try to live up to it. The name is part of a person, and he will try to live up to it partly because of other people’s reactions to it. It is a well-known fact that people with common first names fare better than those with unique ones, when employers pick resumes, for example. Then, a phenomenon called implicit egotism exists where people are unconsciously drawn to things, people, and places that sound like their own names.

Yet, a reputation is more than a name. A reputation happens as the result of people’s experiences with one person, which is sometimes unfair, either way. This means a reputation can never be a hundred percent factual. Still, it is something to go by, since no one can perfectly predict anyone else’s true character.

To put it in a nutshell, a person’s character is much more than his reputation because it is who that person is when no one is watching. Someone with a good character does the right thing intrinsically because it is right to do what is right and he doesn’t mind living or not living up to any reputation.