Online user reviews can make you choose wrong products

Boston : When buying products online, people often rely on the ratings and reviews of others to choose. However, scientists suggest that people tend to use this information in ways that can work to their disadvantage.

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicate that people tend to favor a product that has more reviews, even when it has the same low rating as an alternative product.

"It's extremely common for websites and apps to display the average score of a product along with the number of reviews," said Derek Powell of Stanford University.

"We found that people were biased toward choosing to purchase more popular products and that this sometimes led them to make very poor decisions," Powell said. As opportunities to buy products and services online multiply, we have greater access than ever before to huge amounts of first-hand information about users' experiences.

Looking at actual products available on Amazon.com, researchers found no relationship between the number of reviews a product had and its average rating. In other words, real-world data show that a large number of reviews is not a reliable indicator of a product's quality.

"By examining a large dataset of reviews from Amazon.com, we were able to build a statistical model of how people should choose products," said Powell. The researchers found that this pattern of results fit closely with a statistical model based on social inference. That is, people seem to use the number of reviews as shorthand for a product's popularity, independent of the product's average rating.