Status Reset: How Scandals Affect the Evaluative Advantages of Status

Status effects are pervasive across organizational and market settings. In this paper, we examine whether the tendency of high-status actors to be evaluated more positively irrespective of performance—a phenomenon often referred to as the “Matthew effect”—is robust to the occurrence of negative events that affect the field. We argue that because the benefits of status manifest in the evaluation of performance under uncertainty, and because negative events are known to induce discontinuities in evaluation, exposing actors within the field to stricter scrutiny, Matthew-type effects accruing to high-status actors should be diminished or erased in the aftermath of such events. Negative events, such as scandals, in fact, engender a generalized loss of trust within the field; because trust primarily accrues to high-status actors, however, these actors no longer being given the benefit of the doubt results in the evaluative advantages of status (in terms of deference and taken-for-grantedness) being lost. Using unique observational data on media coverage of football referees in Italy before and after the 2006 scandal known as Calciopoli and two experiments, we find broad support for our predictions.