Researchers Show How Easy It Is To Manipulate Online Opinions

jcatcw writes "A recent study shows that a single random up-vote, randomly chosen, created a herding behavior in ratings that resulted in a 25% increase in the ratings but the negative manipulation had no effect. An intuitive explanation for this asymmetry is that we tend to go along with the positive opinions of others, but we tend to be skeptical of the negative opinions of others, and so we go in and correct what we think is an injustice. The third major result was that these effects varied by topic. So in business and society, culture, politics, we found substantial susceptibility to positive herding, whereas in general news, economics, IT, we found no such herding effects in the positive or negative direction."

Comments

Re:Slashdot members knows this

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry girlintraining,

I have read many of your comments. Sometimes they are great and insightful constructed logically such that even if you disagree you can understand it is genuinely constructive, earning you heaps of karma,

Sometimes you say some pretty heavily debated shit. No doubt burning your karma to the ground.

Basically, the reason you flip-flop on karma, is because you flip-flop in the quality of your comments. Not because you told an apple fanboy that apple didn't invent the tablet.