Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the way people judge how helpful a review is in informing their decision as to whether to make a purchase. In particular, we are interested in how the summary statistics an individual sees influences judgments of a review’s helpfulness. We find perceived helpfulness of a given review decreases as the star rating of that review gets further from the mean rating. Additionally, participants were more likely to search for reviews close to the mean. Both of these findings are consistent with confirmation bias. We explore, but do not find support for, alternative possible explanations.