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

OK

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with that.

Why I moderate the way I do

[techno-vampire]

When I have mod points, I look for posts that haven't been moderated at all. I figure that once a post's been modded up, there are lots of people who will mod it up further, if appropriate (or just from the herd instinct) so I save my points for posts that haven't been noticed before.

obvious

[MondoGordo]

People are more easily swayed by opinions in subjective areas, culture, politics, business than in objective ones, news, IT, science. How obvious can a study be?

Brain dump summary

[steelfood]

Is it just me, or has there recently been a rash of poorly-edited summaries that have been nothing more than a brain dump of the submitter? Like dupes, it used to happen occasionally, but now it's at least once or twice a day.

That aside, a story about the psychology of online feedback on Slashdot. What could possibly go wrong...