Decision contamination in the wild: Sequential dependencies in online review ratings

• Main Authors: Dale, R. (Author), Jones, M.N (Author), Vinson, D.W (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer New York LLC 2019
• Subjects: behavior assessment; Behavior Rating Scale; Bias; Big data; Cognitive principles; Data mining; decision making; Decision making; Decision Making; human; Humans; Judgment; Motion Pictures; movie; Online reviews; online system; Online Systems; Sequential dependence; statistical bias; television; Television
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Current judgments are systematically biased by prior judgments. Such biases occur in ways that seem to reflect the cognitive system’s ability to adapt to statistical regularities within the environment. These cognitive sequential dependencies have primarily been evaluated in carefully controlled laboratory experiments. In this study, we used these well-known laboratory findings to guide our analysis of two datasets, consisting of over 2.2 million business review ratings from Yelp and 4.2 million movie and television review ratings from Amazon. We explored how within-reviewer ratings are influenced by previous ratings. Our findings suggest a contrast effect: Current ratings are systematically biased away from prior ratings, and the magnitude of this bias decays over several reviews. This work is couched within a broader program that aims to use well-established laboratory findings to guide our understanding of patterns in naturally occurring and large-scale behavioral data. © 2018, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.