Do we prefer praise from acquaintances or strangers? An experiment on esteem seeking in one-shot versus repeated interactions.

We present an experiment designed to identify whether repeated interactions between people, relative to one-shot interactions, influences the extent they undertake costly actions to improve their social image. We expected these actions to be reduced in repeated interaction but, in contrast, we find they were increased. Gender differences are critical to our findings, with females more likely to spend some money to improve their social image than males irrespective of treatment, but those males who spend, spend significantly more when interactions are repeated. Repeating interactions, and gender, also influence the formation of feedback participants provide to one another.