The Authority Expectancy Effect in Multi-Party Conflict

Abstract

In multi-party competitive settings, across experiments on resource allocation, fault attribution, and dispute mediation, we test whether social authority (SA) cues such as occupational status and institutional documentation behave as if scalar weights were added to one side of a judgment. We reject this scalar-weight null on both of its predictions: cue effects are not independent in allocation decisions, where the same pair of cues interacts in opposite directions across models, and evidentiary cues do not exert a fixed directional influence in multi-turn disputes, where identical documentation draws protection to one party or extends it to both depending on which party holds it. The cues also govern whether a judgment is issued at all: removing an occupational label while retaining documentary evidence drives four of six models into refusal, yet the same label sharply reduces refusal when documentation is present, so the gate is subject to the same interaction as the judgment. We formalize this pattern as the Authority Expectancy Effect (AEE), comprising evidential reinterpretation, whereby identical content yields different judgments depending on which party bears the SA signal, and \textit{direction sensitivity}, whereby the same evidentiary cue favours different parties, or one party versus both, depending on the holder's authority position.