Social Valuation across Multiple Audiences: The Interplay of Ability and Identity Judgments

How do evaluators judge candidates positively evaluated by an external, non-peer audience? This question is critical to individuals and organizations reaching out to various audiences for key resources. Complementing prior works that document how evaluators rely on available indices about past appreciations to evaluate candidates, we highlight a critical yet overlooked distinction between endogenous indices, certified by a peer audience, and exogenous indices, originating in an external audience. While indices of past appreciations positively influence peer valuation by conveying information about the candidates’ unobservable abilities, exogenous indices, we argue, may also be indicative of candidates’ failure to conform to an expected peer identity. The combination of the two opposite effects suggests an inverted-U shaped relationship between exogenous indices and peer valuation, mitigated by the identity proximity between the peer audience and the external audience, and the availability of informative e...