Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 25, 2025

The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: August 25, 2023
Social influence makes outlier opinions in online reviews offer more helpful information
Kunhao Yang1,2, Itsuki Fujisaki3,4, Kazuhiro Ueda5
1Faculty of Law, Chuo Gakuin University, Abiko, Chiba, 270-1196, Japan. yangkunhao93@gmail.com.
Abstract:
Identifying helpful information from large-scale online reviews has become a core issue in studies on harnessing wisdom-of-crowds. We investigated whether online reviews expressing dissenting opinions (i.e., outlier reviews) can provide helpful information. Using statistical and simulation methods with a large-scale dataset, we found that, compared with other online reviews, outlier reviews were deemed more helpful because they provided more sufficient, neutral, and concise information. To interpret these results, we considered that in collective behaviours, a prevalent social psychological process-conformity (i.e., changing one's behaviour in response to pressure from others)-pressured reviewers expressing dissenting opinions. This motivated them to provide more convincing evidence (i.e., sufficient, neutral, and concise information). This study offers a simple yet effective approach for eliciting helpful information from many online reviews and deepens the understanding of the mechanism underlying collective online behaviour. Specifically, conformity was considered to cause biases in the collective behaviour of humans; however, this study revealed that conformity can elicit valuable outcomes in collective behaviour.
Related Concept Videos
Outliers and Influential Points
Social Proof
Group Polarization
Groupthink
What Are Outliers?
The z score is used to find outliers or unusual values. It should be noted that any values beyond -2 and +2 are...
Conformity

