Hotels are ranked on TripAdvisor, books and consumer goods on Amazon, restaurants and services on Yelp. The wisdom of the online crowd sways countless decisions on where to dine, what to read, and whether to buy.
But is the crowd really that wise? Apparently not always, according to a study published Thursday that showed consumers’ ratings of comments on a news website were easily swayed by the positive ratings posted by others.
The research, coauthored by a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides a cautionary tale for the social-networked age: Grade inflation is polluting the Internet.
The study showed that while people were easily, if subconsciously, nudged into overinflated enthusiasm and approval, they were not similarly susceptible to negative influences. That suggests that review sites may be skewed toward overly favorable ratings.
“The case where the wisdom-of-the-crowd effects work well is where each person brings their own observation and knowledge, however imperfect and idiosyncratic,” said Christopher Chabris, an associate psychology professor at Union College who was not involved in the research. “What this shows is when you don’t have that independence and everyone sees the history of other people’s opinions, you can get big biases in the outcome.”
Why did Iraqi WMD reports just surface in my skull?
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Oh, yeah, speaking about independence and biases.
The findings published in the journal Science surprised even coauthor Sinan Aral of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, who studies how social influences can affect decision-making and purchases.
The experiment was conducted on an unidentified online news website, where comments are voted up or down based on how good other readers think they are....
I think I'm linking them at the end of this piece. Sorry I don't allow comments here, folks. I turned it on here but it doesn't work, and it never worked on my initial RtT site.
And if I allowed comments I would have even more to do when the point of this blog is information and analysis, not argument.
The power of social influence to skew people’s choices has been clear in offline environments. In one famous experiment conducted in the 1950s, people were asked to choose which of three lines was the same length as another. If other people in the room publicly made an obviously wrong choice, many participants went along.
Right about the time the CIA was infiltrating newsrooms.
Online ratings seem empowering; after all, the aggregated feelings of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people aren’t subject to the same limitations of an expert review, which reflects a single person’s experience and may be influenced by conflicts of interest and other unknown sources of bias.
Like internali$ing the value$ of your ma$ters.
But the new study is part of a growing body of research showing online ratings can also be skewed and could be vulnerable to manipulation by the companies or people being evaluated....
They are talking about restaurant ratings, folks, not their own steaming stink-piles of mind-manipulating propaganda or all the Israeli and U.S. government trolls making the rounds.
--more--"
