Artificial Intelligence and the Reshaping of Social Evaluations

This chapter examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the nature and dynamics of social evaluations. The chapter builds on the concept of conjoined agency between humans and technologies to propose a framework for understanding how different types of technology—assisting, arresting, augmenting, and automating—shape the formation and evolution of social evaluations. Drawing on organisational research on social judgements and technological change, we theorise how these different forms of human–AI interaction influence three key dimensions of social evaluations: the degree of change, the predictability of change, and responsiveness to environmental feedback. Specifically, the chapter explores how AI systems with varying degrees of agency and autonomy influence the cognitive processes and social interactions through which judgements are formed, and how these shifts impact the stability and institutionalisation of social evaluations. Our analysis reveals that assisting technologies enable moderate adaptability while maintaining human oversight, arresting technologies prioritise consistency through rigid protocols, augmenting technologies facilitate nuanced judgements through human–AI collaboration, and automating technologies enable rapid adaptation but may introduce volatility and opacity. The chapter concludes by examining how blockchain technology might help address emerging challenges of polarisation and misinformation in AI-driven social evaluations, while highlighting important directions for future research on the biographical trajectories of evaluation technologies, their design principles, and their regulation.