Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway.
Department of Management & Organizations, Stern School of Business-NYU, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Sep 25;15(9):e0238651. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238651. eCollection 2020.
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.
候选人的地位和与评审团成员的社会亲近程度如何相互作用，从而影响基于同行的评价环境中的认可度？在这项研究中，我们通过采用混合方法来探讨这个问题。我们首先检查了基于同行的评价竞赛——“银标奖”（挪威最负盛名的数字广告奖项竞赛之一）中颁奖的实地数据。实地研究揭示了地位和社会亲近程度之间的消极互动对奖项分配的存在。然后，我们进行了两项实验，以探究导致这一发现的机制。在第一个实验中，我们复制了实地研究中观察到的主要模式。在第二个实验中，我们表明这种相互作用效应取决于评价环境的性质。当观众的决策是公开的（即其他观众知道他们）时，社会亲近度缓和了地位对候选人认可度的影响，但当决策是私下的（即其他观众不知道他们）时，这种影响并不存在。最后，我们讨论了我们的研究对锦标赛仪式中评价结果背后的社会心理过程的研究的几个启示。
