Online, an initial positive rating is surprisingly influential

Today our opinions are shaped immediately by the reactions of others. Case in point - when the former Disney child star Miley Cyrus gyrated lasciviously on stage at a recent music awards, the outpouring of disapproval was filled with references to the way viewers had reacted negatively on social media. As the story spread, it was hard to tell if people's reactions were a direct response to Cyrus or if they were also influenced by the negative opinions of others. A new study has examined this phenomenon in relation to the comments posted to a news-sharing website similar to Reddit.com and Digg.com. Users of the site share links to news stories and others then post their comments on the stories. In turn these comments can be rated positively or negatively, thus encouraging or deterring others from reading them. Such systems promise to martial the wisdom of the crowd. However, they could also be vulnerable to distortion if raters are influenced not only by the comment in question, but also by the ratings it has already received. Lev Muchnik and his colleagues tested this possibility experimentally. Collaborating with a news-sharing website they randomly assigned either a positive or negative first-rating, or no rating (control condition), to 101,281 real comments posted over 5 months. This simple manipulation had a significant effect on the way other site users subsequently rated the comments. An initial positive rating on a comment tended to have a snowball effect, encouragi...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs