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I tend not to trust product reviews very much. I don't trust expert
reviews because
* I don't know if the expert prioritizes what I do; (s)he might be picky about certain things etc.
* I don't know whether or not the expert is glossing over or ignoring certain faults because it's bad business to do so.
* I often don't know whether the review is actually an expert, in which case the things I mention below apply.
As for Joe-Schmoe reviews (some of these apply but less-so IMO to experts):
* Non-pros who review stuff have bought it, and they're apt to seek
to justify their decisions. The more Jane spends as a proportion of
her income, the more likely it is that she'll inflate her view of the
prodict, I imagine.
* People who review stuff tend not to have musch in the way of
comparison data points -- they're apt to be comparing a product to
whatever they had before or after. This could be a source of
systematic error.
* People may modify their opinions to reflect their opinions of brands.
Anyway, it seems like a "blind use test" ould be a great way to
examine interactions of well-known phenomena in social psych in the
real world as well as being really helpful for consumers--one could
control for the sources of most of the above variation. Has anyone
done this sort of thing? I imagine it'd be somewhat pricy to start;
20k+ for equipment, but the marginal cost per-participant might be
pretty small, and I bet there are industry types who'd want to fund
such a thing, e.g., execs who thing their products have an undeservedly poor rep.
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| | Posted 4/19/2006 4:42 PM - 1 view - 0 comments
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