This is your brain. This is your brain on Reputation.

Talk about PR metrics -- people's responses to reputational cues are being scanned in MRIs to learn what parts of the brain are responsible for managing social status.  As reported on NPR's Science Friday:

"'Although we all intuitively know that a good reputation makes us feel good, the idea that good reputation is a reward has long been just an assumption in social sciences, and there has been no scientific proof,' says Norihiro Sadato, a researcher at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Aichi, Japan...'We found that these seemingly different kinds of rewards (good reputation vs. money) are biologically coded by the same neural structure, the striatum,' Sadato writes in an email."

The full journal article, which was published last April, is locked behind a purchase gate. Thankfully the SciFri piece has an audio interview with Caroline Zink, the author of one of the studies on the subject.

Yes, there were pictures of real brains I could have used.  You are SO lucky that I didn't.