The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

With the increasing proliferation of information technology, we can conveniently harness others’ opinions. A previous study (Fujisaki, Honda & Ueda, 2018) which focused on online review sites showed that the purposes of the choices (i.e., choices for self/others) affected how participants harnessed others’ evaluations. They conducted a binary-product-choice-task after instructing the purposes of the choices. The task composed of two rating distributions which had similar average of ratings but different variance of ratings (high / low). They analyzed across all questions, so this study re-analyzed the influence of the questions on choice by using their behavioral data and found their effect. Specifically, participants changed their choices according to the averages of high-variance options. This leads us to presume that participants may have easily recognized differences in high-variance options among the questions more than low-variance options. Finally, we shall discuss how our findings can contribute real-world online review sites.