Compared to What? How Social and Historical Reference Points Affect Citizens’ Performance Evaluations
通过两个嵌入全国代表性样本（n=3443）的实验，发现公民对教育、失业等公共服务的绩效评价本质上是相对比较过程，社会参照点（与其他组织比较）的重要性几乎是历史参照点（与过去比较）的两倍。
The question of what is "good" or "poor" performance is difficult to answer without applying a reference point-a standard for comparison.Citizens' evaluation of performance information will therefore tend to be guided by reference points.We test how reference points alter citizens' evaluation of organizational performance.Specifically, drawing on Herbert Simon, we test how citizens use historical (internal) and social (external) reference points when making relative comparisons: How important is performance relative to past performance?And how important is performance relative to the performance of other organizations?Two experiments are embedded within a large nationally representative sample of citizens (n=3443).The experiments assign historical and social reference points for performance data on education and unemployment to citizens.We find that citizens' performance evaluation is fundamentally a relative process.Interestingly, we show that social reference points are almost twice as important to citizens' evaluations as historical reference points.We find mixed evidence of a negativity bias in citizens' relative evaluations.The strong social reference point effects have implications for studying citizens' response to performance and how managers can frame and manipulate external performance data.