I'm not a sociologist, but I think the tendency to disregard input from those with a different status is universal. Someone brought up the example of whether a non-black is or isn't able to really experiencing what its like to be black. I think its tied into the "we" and "they" mindset that groups use to define themselves.
People like to have that sense of belonging or of being understood. The group is usually made up of people with shared and related statuses (i.e. JW, XJW ) which for the most part means having had similar experiences. Though its a crude filter, people from "other" groups would be less likely to understand us - so we'll discount their take.
I think we often just use the simpler, quicker way of filtering for "status" to find people with shared experiences - because alot of times it does work - but sometimes like those web-page filtering programs we can miss out on something very useful.