When Opposites Don’t Attract: The New Information Environment, Polarization, and What Happens to Social Evaluations When ‘The World Goes to Hell in a Handbasket’

Organizations today operate in a new information environment, where changing technologies have enabled fundamentally different forms and pathways of information creation and dissemination while also generating unintended consequences – chief among them increased polarization. In combination, the new information environment and polarization have profoundly altered the social processes underpinning social evaluations. To animate social evaluations research on these issues, we consider how information environment shifts and increased polarization affect the value and durability of five social evaluation types – legitimacy, reputation, status, celebrity/infamy, and stigma/esteem. We highlight the implications for both theorizing about and empirically studying social evaluations in an ever more polarized world.