Resumen de Browsing through products and people: online review, ratings, and swiping
The main proposal of the first chapter is that when the review’s narrative style makes consumers feel as in the company of the online reviewer (i.e., social presence), they engage in an imaginary social interaction with the reviewer. This chapter builds on the e-WOM literature by expanding our understanding of the effect of social presence in the acceptance of online recommendations, and of the mechanism underlying its persuasive effect. Across five studies we found that higher perceived social presence improves attitudes toward the reviewer because of the enhanced visualization of what could have been a face-to-face interaction. The result showed that perceptions of social presence provide significant persuasive power by increasing acceptance even when a non-favored item is recommended. These findings are particularly relevant to online retailers providing practical insights for brands, social media, and recommendation platforms to enrich their medium with consumer-generated social cues that can generate social presence.
In the second chapter, we investigated if and how different weights are distributed to ratings of different scales when they are aggregated to form a product attitude. Answering this question is important for two reasons. First, product review websites are only a few keystrokes away from each other, and the rating scales vary across them. This implies that consumers have to aggregate information from these sources to form opinions about products and services. Second, prior literature cannot provide a definite answer to this question and different lines of research have conflicting predictions. Our four studies provide support for what we call the scale effect: Ratings on larger scales are given more weight when combining ratings from different scales. The findings suggest that the scale effect is not due to the numerical magnitude of ratings. Nor fluency effect and neither scale granularity can explain the scale effect. Instead, this effect results from a deliberate intention to give more weight to ratings expressed on larger scales to increase evaluation accuracy. The scale effect has direct implications for recommendation systems and performance appraisals that aim to guide consumer’s product attitudes and choices.
In the third chapter we examined if searching for a match by swift evaluation of profile photos as in online dating application, would promote a commodified view of other people. This project finds its inspiration in a recurrent criticism of online dating apps accusing them of creating an experience of “relationshopping” that compares online dating to being in a supermarket and shopping for a partner “off a supermarket shelf”. We conducted four studies. The findings provided evidence for a reduced perception of humanness, and lower fairness considerations after a date search task. We further showed that a focus on rejecting undesirable dating targets as opposed to a focus on choosing desirable ones could lead to opposing effects. The significance of these findings can be realized taking into account that disregarding the human behind a profile can spill over into offline interactions and eventually become a norm.
