Abstract
How do candidates' status and social proximity to members of the evaluating audience interact to shape recognition in peer-based evaluative settings? In this study, we shed light on this question by adopting a mixed-method approach. We first examined field data on the conferral of awards in a peer-based evaluative contest-"The Silver Tag"-which is one of the most prestigious digital advertising awards contests in Norway. The field study revealed the existence of a negative interaction between status and social proximity on the allocation of awards. We then conducted two experiments to probe the mechanisms responsible for this finding. In the first experiment, we replicated the main pattern observed in the field study. In the second experiment, we showed that the interaction effect is contingent on the nature of the evaluative setting. When audience members' decisions were in the public domain (i.e., the other audience members knew them), social proximity tempered the effect of status on candidates' recognition, but it did not when decisions were private (i.e., the other audience members did not know them). We conclude by discussing several implications of our study for research on the socio-psychological processes underlying evaluative outcomes in tournament rituals.
Highlights
Extensive evidence across cultural fields as diverse as academic publishing [1], wine tasting [2], film industry [3], advertising [4], and screenwriting agencies [5] reveals the role of status as a key driver of evaluation and choice
We show that when the evaluation is public–and so potential violations of the meritocratic ideal in social evaluation are easier to detect and stigmatize, if not punish–social proximity mitigates the effect of status on candidates’ recognition, but it does not when those decisions are private
In the Appendix, we report the results of a replication study (i.e., Study 4) where we use a different manipulation of status (‘famous’ and ‘not very famous’ instead of ‘well-known expert’ and ‘non-expert’) and a different scenario describing the evaluative setting and we replicate the negative interaction between status and social ties
Summary
Extensive evidence across cultural fields as diverse as academic publishing [1], wine tasting [2], film industry [3], advertising [4], and screenwriting agencies [5] reveals the role of status as a key driver of evaluation and choice. Prevailing explanations for the positive association between status and evaluative outcomes posit that status serves as a source of information about actors’ unobserved quality. In this vein, one’s relative standing in a social system [6] positively affects others’ expectations as well as behaviour toward the object of evaluation. High-status actors are assumed to be more competent [7] and more frequently attended to [6]; they are usually granted more recognition for their performance relative to low-status actors.
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