How do the evaluations 1 person makes of his own acts, in conjunction with his knowledge of another person's evaluation of the same acts, affect his ensuing evaluations of the other person's acts? This question was analyzed from the points of view of Heider's balance theory and a more straight-forward reciprocation theory. An experimental situation in which groups of 4 Ss continually exchanged evaluations of one another's artistic judgments revealed that an S, in sending evaluations to others, tended to adopt a reciprocating strategy which was interpreted as an effort to maximize the rewards he received from others. The fact that this tendency was observed for low self-evaluators as well as high self-evaluators suggested that there may be certain limitations to a balance theoretical interpretation of the evaluative process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)