Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness. PC thought has been both berated and defended, but there has been little attempt to understand it. Phillip J. Nelson and Kenneth V. Greene do so by looking at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance one's reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.
Reputation seeking has profound effects on the nature of government policies and how they have changed over time. For many issues such as environmental, educational, and poverty programs one signals one's trustworthiness by advocating only one side of the issue (asymmetric "goodness"). As a result, government expenditures on these programs have increased over time because there has been a growth in the importance of this kind of reputation signaling