"Theodore Caplow, in Principles of Organization, has called the aggrandizement effect: the distortion upward of the prestige of an organization by its members. Caplow examined thirty-three kinds of organizations — ranging from dance studios to Protestant and Catholic churches, from skid row missions to big banks, and from advertising agencies to university departments - and found that members overestimated the prestige of their organization some "eight times as often as they underestimated it" (when compared with judgments by Outsiders). More in point for us, while members tended to disagree with Outsiders about the standing of their own organization, they tended to agree with them about the prestige of the other organizations in the same set. These findings can be taken as something of a sociological parable."
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Robert K. Merton, ‎Norman W. Storer (1973), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. p. 216 .
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Principles_of_organization
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Principles of organization
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