•Members of small rural communities see their reputation as more vulnerable to harm than people who live in large cities.•Participants who imagined living in a small vs large city reported more concern for reputation and were less willing to engage in unethical action.•Across 65 countries we observe a small negative relationship between community size and concern for reputation. Small rural communities differ in social visibility compared to large urban cities due to their interconnected social networks. We hypothesized the higher social visibility of rural communities would cause members to see their reputations as more vulnerable and make them more concerned about protecting their reputations than people in cities. An online experiment (N=198) found imagining being in a small rural community with high social visibility caused people to report more concern for reputation and resist risking their reputation by price gouging, compared to those who imagined living in a large anonymous urban community. A cross-sectional analysis of the World Values Survey (N=119,745) revealed a small but significant correlation between living in smaller communities and having more concern for one's reputation. This work has implications for understanding how cultural and moral differences across regions might arise from geographic features of those regions. Display omitted