Biases in Member Judgments of Gains and Losses in the Information Exchange of Interactive Groups and Teams

This chapter proposes that agents use a heuristic in managing their information exchange in which expected status loss depends directly on the agent’s status distance from a potential evaluator. While it is well recognized that negative evaluations are more costly when their source is a higher status group member relative to the target and at least one of a member’s motives is to minimize social loss through the receipt of status weighted negative evaluations, how expected social loss depends on the social distance between the sender and recipient of a negative evaluation has not been well-defined.