Beneath the public theater of social media likes and re-tweets, personal reputations are forged in quieter spaces: private threads, text chains, and Slack channels, where trust is earned, grace extended, and futures quietly rewritten. 

Most of what shapes our reputations is invisible; applause, large follower counts, and public praise don’t guarantee a promotion. Flourishing careers, collaborations, and communities often hinge on conversations we’ll never see: a text-message warning, a hallway debrief, a whisper at a coffee meeting. These “shadow reputations” can stabilize cooperation or quietly sabotage it. They determine not just how we’re perceived, but whether we’re invited into the room where decisions happen.

The Quiet Economy of Trust

In any complex network, we rarely observe enough firsthand to evaluate everyone ourselves. So people exchange reputational information: gossip, broadly defined, to decide who’s dependable, who cuts corners, and who deserves grace. The question isn’t if those whispers shape outcomes—that’s a given. But how do they help or harm?

Mathematical models of cooperation reveal a key mechanism: coordination.

If people share the same basic information about someone, cooperation is much easier,” says Joshua Plotkin, a professor of natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He adds that systems falter when people hold wildly different views of the same person; they stabilize when communities converge on a shared sense of who’s fair, who’s reckless, and who merits trust.

“If my view and yours differ wildly about the same person, we punish what the other sees as blameless,” Plotkin explains. “Private exchanges reduce those mismatches.”

How Backchannels Change Outcomes

Inside most organizations, decisive conversations rarely happen in performance reviews or all-hands meetings. A team misses a deadline; the official update is neutral. However, in a side thread, the label hardens: reliability risk, and future opportunities shift without a word being spoken on the record.

The reverse is also true: a single act of integrity, owning an error, or showing up consistently, can build trust (and quiet referrals) that never appear on a dashboard but quietly unlock doors.

Backchannels don’t just circulate opinions; they move power. #MeToo-era whisper networks, where women warned one another about predatory men, transformed industries long before public accusations. At Google, an employee-run salary spreadsheet exposed inequities and forced action. At Apple, even attempts to block a pay-equity Slack channel revealed the potency of those quiet forums. In startup hiring, a single text, such as “slipped milestones on sprints 3–4; needed PM escalation to hit MVP date,” can make or break a candidate.

In the TV show Mad Men (“The New Girl,” S2, Episode 5), Peggy helps Don not because of a public directive, but because of earlier acts of promised and kept discretion that built trust, leading to forward-promoting business moves.

Gossip as a Force for Order

Reputational information-sharing can also regulate behavior. Research by Matthew Feinberg, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto, shows that prosocial gossip—sharing reputational information privately to warn others—“deters selfishness and promotes cooperation, operating as a low-cost enforcement system when formal penalties are weak or absent.”

Plotkin’s theoretical work complements the behavioral evidence. “Even private communication between peers about privately held views can engender a degree of consensus,” he says. 

Slack, Structure, and the Micro-signals of Trust

The structure of modern platforms also shapes back-channel talk. In a study of 4,300 Slack channels inside a multinational R&D organization, computer scientist Dakuo Wang and colleagues found that even without analyzing message content, structural patterns such as thread depth, posting cadence, and reaction rhythms could predict how collaboration unfolded across project work, support, and social conversations.

Even when a company never assigns a “reputation score,” people infer credibility and reliability from micro-signals: who gets rapid replies, whose updates trigger action, where sidebars form, and who’s invited into them. 

Noise and Distortion: When Coordination Goes Wrong

If signals are stale or biased, can this consensus harden around error? Backchannels amplify whatever norms a community already holds. Used well, they correct misperceptions quickly, reveal patterns of harm that a public feed might hide, and direct trust toward people who’ve earned it.

“There is a tension between the benefits of gossip for promoting cohesive reputations and the possible loss of reliable information or, worse yet, a possible bias towards negative distortion,” Plotkin says. Long gossip chains risk introducing noise. Remember the childhood game of telephone, where the story at the end of a chain of whispered information was so different from the original that it was literally laughable? Nevertheless, Plotkin says gossip produces a consensus that is “net beneficial…compared to no gossip at all.”

But the deeper risk isn’t mere drift; it’s how bias and power decide whose reputations get distorted and who pays the price.

Bias, Power, and the Dark Side of Whisper Campaigns

“In the context of negative prejudgments,” Plotkin explains, “gossip can reinforce stereotypes and even spread negative views of a group to individuals who did not originally subscribe to the stereotype.” When marginalized groups are small, that distortion can improve the average welfare of the majority “at the unfair expense” of the minority. The problem, he notes, is not gossip itself but “the social norms that permit stereotypes and the cognitive ease of relying on prejudgments instead of direct observations,” says Plotkin.

Gossip can also generalize too broadly. “We might observe and judge the behavior of a single individual and then generalize and assign that reputation to the entire sub-group…That type of stereotyping spreads quickly and persists even when it is a net negative.”

Decades of social-network research also show that reputational signals from people in positions of authority often carry disproportionate weight. In professional contexts, gossip can become weaponized. Hollywood’s notorious “whisper campaigns,” which involve spreading negative rumors to derail awards contenders or undermine rivals, are a stark example. 

“That sounds pretty bad,” Plotkin says. “Fortunately, a hiring or awards committee is usually small and rational enough to stick to facts. Our results apply to day-to-day social behavior, where the benefits typically outweigh the risks—not to those unidirectional judgment settings.”

“You might fear the gossip about you, but private gossip typically reaches a consensus that actually reflects your actions, unless you’ve been a jerk.”

Using Backchannels Well

Back-channel communication can be more constructive and accurate. In lab experiments, Feinberg and colleagues found that prosocial gossip, especially when focused on specific behaviors rather than vague character judgments, deters selfishness and promotes cooperation, acting as a low-cost enforcement system when formal penalties are weak or absent.

Additionally, keep in mind that old intel is prone to distortion—people and circumstances can change. Plotkin’s models demonstrate that reputational information is most effective when it’s regularly updated with new observations.

Who are we as a company, a community, or as individuals? Although seemingly scary, back-channel chatter can help bring to light our better selves.

Alene Dawson is a Southern California-based writer known for her intelligent and popular features, cover stories, interviews, and award-winning publications. She’s a regular contributor to the LA Times.