Social experiment or not.. this seems like it encourages a sort of group think. Are we not all stronger for expressing our ideas and then letting the feedback determine how we feel and about it? On the other hand- social cohesion can be helped by understanding how what we say is received. Is there really a way to glean what we want to learn from an anonymous points system?
The biggest problem that I have with this system is that it, of course, relies heavily on the collective subjectivity of the entire group. I have, as I'm sure that you have, as well, seen the countless times where users have had to be told to "grow up" and "be mature" and stuff like that on this site. It still continues to this day. Now, you've got these kinds of people running around and rating others?
Take a group of one hundred people, for instance, on a Web site called life (this Web site revolves around life experience, of course). Five of them are highly experienced fifty-year-old's, ten are average-experienced thirty-year-old's, and eighty-five are prepubescent teenagers. The teenagers make up the majority, so the ratings of all one hundred people will be biased towards them (assuming that everyone rates in the same amount). What the highly experienced fifty-year-old's see as a good post, due to the content and maturity of the post and regardless of whether or not they agree with or like the poster, will be seen as a bad post by the teenagers because they don't agree with it or because they have personal issues with the poster. In this case, the ratings will lean towards the negative side.
This is, more or less, what I feel may happen on JC (due to the number of users that have to constantly be reminded of their less-than-acceptable behavior, as well as others that give out random reputations or people that hold grudges against others). If these people are in the majority of the people that actively rate others, then the green and red bars will be biased towards the way that they view things. A new user showing up and seeing three green bars might assume that this particular person is knowledgeable and experienced, yet the green bars that the person accumulated were because the majority just really liked the person, kind of like how people seem to just like Chuck Norris.
As always, I may very well be wrong, so I'll throw this out there as food for thought and just sit back and watch how this reputation system plays out on this site. I don't really have a solution because a large portion of my thoughts and time are being used to ensure a successful completion of a busy-as-hell college semester.