September 24, 2013 at 21:25Herd effect of voters. Muuu ... MIT's research
Moooo ... Internet users tend to follow the herd when it comes to comment rating on a news site.
The “wisdom of the crowd” has become the mantra of the age of the Internet. Need to choose a new vacuum cleaner? Check reviews on Amazon. Is this or that restaurant good? See what, for example, TripAdvisor or Yelp tells you. But new research shows that such online ratings do not always determine the best choice. A large-scale experiment by MIT ’s web users found that such ratings are largely susceptible to irrational “herd behavior” and that the herd can be manipulated.
Sometimes the crowd is really smarter than you. Classic examples are the assumption of the weight of the bull or the number of candies in the bank. Your assumption is likely to be far from the truth, while the average choice of many people is noticeably closer to the true number. But what happens when the goal is to evaluate something less tangible or material, like the quality or value of a product? According to one version, the wisdom of the crowd is still real because It is a measurement of the totality of people's opinions and forms a stable, reliable value. Skeptics, however, argue that others can easily influence people's opinions. So pushing the crowd at an early stage of forming an opinion, offering opposite opinions, for example, provoking the crowd to a very positive or very negative assessment, you can influence the opinion of the crowd in one direction or another. To check,
The team, led by Sinan Aral, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, did just that. Aral secretly worked with a popular site on which new posts were published. He says that this site is similar to Reddit, but keeps the name a secret, as it has another experiment currently with the same site and does not want it to be corrupted under the influence of the media (the information slipped on Habré was News2Ru, but where this information comes from, if the author of the study is silent, remains a mystery). The website allows users to post comments on the news and vote on each other's comments up or down. The counted voices are visible in the form of numbers next to the commentary, the position of the comments of the chronological sequence ... (well, everything’s straight, as on Habré) Posts on the site receive an average of about 10 comments and about three votes per comment. This is a continuation of himan experiment with movie ratings, the task of which is to determine how individuals influence each other online (result: strongly). This time, the scientist wanted to know how much the crowd affects a person, and whether it can be controlled from the outside.
For 5 months, each comment entered by the user randomly received a “up” vote (positive), a “down” vote (negative), or no vote at all for comparison. The group then watched how users rated these comments. In total, more than 100,000 comments were received from users, which were viewed more than 10 million times and evaluated more than 300 thousand times.
At least when it comes to commentary on news sites, the crowd behaves more “herd” than wisely. Comments that received fake positive votes from researchers were 32% more likely to get more positive votes than comments without any votes at all. By the end of the study, positively manipulated comments received a total premium of about + 25% of the vote. However, the same is not true for negative manipulations. Ratings of comments that received fake negative votes are usually nullified by positive votes.
" Our experimentdoesn’t disclose the psychology of decision-making by people, "says Aral." But this is a clear explanation of the fact that people are more skeptical of negative social influence. They are more willing to support the positive opinions of other users. "
Duncan Watts, a Microsoft Research scientist in New York, agrees with this conclusion. “But one question is whether the herd effect is relevant only for this site or the truth in general,” says Watt. He points out that the category of news in the experiment had a strong influence on people, and how much they could be controlled. “The business category is quite similar to the economy category, but in the first category the influence is 50% greater. What explains this difference? If we are going to apply these findings in the real world, we must know the answers. ” Will the company increase its online sales by manipulating ratings on a massive scale? “It's easier said than done,” Watt says. If people find that they are manipulating the comments on the site, the herd may get scared and run away ...
Translation. Original: Sciencemag.Org JOHN BOHANNON
The study also reported that friends are more likely to support each other. Considering that the Habr - the party is quite closed (registration only by invite, karma, rating, etc.) and this is also a site that generates posts of various topics, then logically there is even greater effect of supporting each other (again, according to the study, in different hubs this can manifest itself in different ways, which was emphasized by Duncan Watts). Of course, all of us here are educated, well-read and with our own opinion, but against universal reflexes and the MIT study “you can’t argue ...
My subjective conclusions (everyone can make his own, I do not pretend to have no alternative):
1. Habr a great fellow that hid the votes for posts before the vote. The same must be done for comments, because it is precisely these studies that describe them. I would even say that it is vital because karma / rating is affected equally by posts and comments alike.
2. If you are the owner of a new customer-oriented resource, having received several positive reviews in the form of comments or likes before forming public opinion, you can substantially predispose the audience to a new product.
3. Once, on the advice of the tripadvisor, I stayed at a hotel in Istanbul and went to high-rated restaurants ... It was hell. It seemed that the ratings were formed in this application by poor students. It is understandable since they are the main users of mobile technologies and similar applications, but then you need to write "rating compiled by such and such an audience." In general, I personally, in your place, would not trust the stars at the booking, tripadvisor and other similar services.
The “wisdom of the crowd” has become the mantra of the age of the Internet. Need to choose a new vacuum cleaner? Check reviews on Amazon. Is this or that restaurant good? See what, for example, TripAdvisor or Yelp tells you. But new research shows that such online ratings do not always determine the best choice. A large-scale experiment by MIT ’s web users found that such ratings are largely susceptible to irrational “herd behavior” and that the herd can be manipulated.
Sometimes the crowd is really smarter than you. Classic examples are the assumption of the weight of the bull or the number of candies in the bank. Your assumption is likely to be far from the truth, while the average choice of many people is noticeably closer to the true number. But what happens when the goal is to evaluate something less tangible or material, like the quality or value of a product? According to one version, the wisdom of the crowd is still real because It is a measurement of the totality of people's opinions and forms a stable, reliable value. Skeptics, however, argue that others can easily influence people's opinions. So pushing the crowd at an early stage of forming an opinion, offering opposite opinions, for example, provoking the crowd to a very positive or very negative assessment, you can influence the opinion of the crowd in one direction or another. To check,
The team, led by Sinan Aral, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, did just that. Aral secretly worked with a popular site on which new posts were published. He says that this site is similar to Reddit, but keeps the name a secret, as it has another experiment currently with the same site and does not want it to be corrupted under the influence of the media (the information slipped on Habré was News2Ru, but where this information comes from, if the author of the study is silent, remains a mystery). The website allows users to post comments on the news and vote on each other's comments up or down. The counted voices are visible in the form of numbers next to the commentary, the position of the comments of the chronological sequence ... (well, everything’s straight, as on Habré) Posts on the site receive an average of about 10 comments and about three votes per comment. This is a continuation of himan experiment with movie ratings, the task of which is to determine how individuals influence each other online (result: strongly). This time, the scientist wanted to know how much the crowd affects a person, and whether it can be controlled from the outside.
For 5 months, each comment entered by the user randomly received a “up” vote (positive), a “down” vote (negative), or no vote at all for comparison. The group then watched how users rated these comments. In total, more than 100,000 comments were received from users, which were viewed more than 10 million times and evaluated more than 300 thousand times.
At least when it comes to commentary on news sites, the crowd behaves more “herd” than wisely. Comments that received fake positive votes from researchers were 32% more likely to get more positive votes than comments without any votes at all. By the end of the study, positively manipulated comments received a total premium of about + 25% of the vote. However, the same is not true for negative manipulations. Ratings of comments that received fake negative votes are usually nullified by positive votes.
" Our experimentdoesn’t disclose the psychology of decision-making by people, "says Aral." But this is a clear explanation of the fact that people are more skeptical of negative social influence. They are more willing to support the positive opinions of other users. "
Duncan Watts, a Microsoft Research scientist in New York, agrees with this conclusion. “But one question is whether the herd effect is relevant only for this site or the truth in general,” says Watt. He points out that the category of news in the experiment had a strong influence on people, and how much they could be controlled. “The business category is quite similar to the economy category, but in the first category the influence is 50% greater. What explains this difference? If we are going to apply these findings in the real world, we must know the answers. ” Will the company increase its online sales by manipulating ratings on a massive scale? “It's easier said than done,” Watt says. If people find that they are manipulating the comments on the site, the herd may get scared and run away ...
Translation. Original: Sciencemag.Org JOHN BOHANNON
From the author of the post ...
The study also reported that friends are more likely to support each other. Considering that the Habr - the party is quite closed (registration only by invite, karma, rating, etc.) and this is also a site that generates posts of various topics, then logically there is even greater effect of supporting each other (again, according to the study, in different hubs this can manifest itself in different ways, which was emphasized by Duncan Watts). Of course, all of us here are educated, well-read and with our own opinion, but against universal reflexes and the MIT study “you can’t argue ...
My subjective conclusions (everyone can make his own, I do not pretend to have no alternative):
1. Habr a great fellow that hid the votes for posts before the vote. The same must be done for comments, because it is precisely these studies that describe them. I would even say that it is vital because karma / rating is affected equally by posts and comments alike.
2. If you are the owner of a new customer-oriented resource, having received several positive reviews in the form of comments or likes before forming public opinion, you can substantially predispose the audience to a new product.
3. Once, on the advice of the tripadvisor, I stayed at a hotel in Istanbul and went to high-rated restaurants ... It was hell. It seemed that the ratings were formed in this application by poor students. It is understandable since they are the main users of mobile technologies and similar applications, but then you need to write "rating compiled by such and such an audience." In general, I personally, in your place, would not trust the stars at the booking, tripadvisor and other similar services.