Personality Characteristics Evident in Product Ratings

I've been curious for some time about the reliability of "ratings and reviews" posted to e-commerce Web sites, in which ordinary people rate and review products, sharing their experiences with others. There's not much secondary research on the topic, so I conducted an informal study of product ratings, subjecting a random sampling to text analysis to determine certain factors about those individuals who post ratings, with an eye toward their reliability and motivation for doing so.

What I found was a bit surprising, though not entirely counterintuitive: the personality types that are evident in the content of reviews would seem to suggest that people who post reviews to commercial sites don't fall into the categories of personality who seek to be helpful to others. Instead, they fall into the personality categories of individuals who are narcissistic and domineering, concerned with stoking their esteem rather than helping others.

As a buyer of goods on the Internet, what I found is definitely going to make me more reluctant to trust reviews, especially the good ones, in that they are not so much the product of a person who wants to help me, but a person who wants me to help him feel smarter about himself by following the same decision, regardless of the outcome.

On the other hand, sellers can still find a way to benefit from ratings and reviews: while customer ratings are clearly disingenuous and of little use to the prospective customer, those who post reviews (who have already purchased toe product) will be able to use ratings and reviews to feed their psychological desires, which is likely to be a positive brand association that will reinforce their decision and make them less likely to switch brands or retailers at the next opportunity to repurchase.

That's not to say that online ratings and reviews are altogether useless - a small proportion of them are posted by people whose genuine interest is in being helpful to others, and by analyzing the text content of their post, retailers who want to make product reviews more beneficial to buyers could use the same tools to "flag" posts that are disingenuous and remove, or at least downplay them.

But until such a solution is in place on the server side, buyers will need to be wary of ratings and reviews.