Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current judgments are systematically biased by priorjudgments. Such biases occur in ways that seem to reflect thecognitive system’s ability to adapt to the statisticalregularities within the environment. These cognitivesequential dependencies have been shown to occur undercarefully controlled laboratory settings as well as more recentstudies designed to determine if such effects occur in realworld scenarios. In this study we use these well-knownfindings to guide our analysis of over 2.2 million businessreview ratings. We explore how both within-reviewer andwithin-business (between reviewer) ratings are influenced byprevious ratings. Our findings, albeit exploratory, suggestthat current ratings are influenced in systematic ways by priorratings. This work is couched within a broader program thataims to determine the validity of laboratory findings usinglarge naturally occurring behavioral data.