Confidence and trust in recommendations

Life is short, so we like to avoid as many bad experiences as we can.  I have seen quite a few movies that are basically two hours of my life that I cannot get back.  I have been to my share of bad restaurants.  So, of course, I’d prefer to avoid more of those experiences in the future.

In some situations, it is easy to find experts that you trust.  For example, for movies, I am a devoted reader of Roger Ebert’s reviews.  When he likes a movie, I generally like it as well, and when he doesn’t, I know that it is safe for me to skip it.  On the other hand, my agreement with Peter Travers of Rolling Stone is lower.  So, I don’t find him to be a reliable guide for movies I should see. 

But, what do people do in cases where they don’t have an expert that they already know they should trust?

A paper by Uma Karmarkar and Zakary Tormala in the April, 2010 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology takes up this question.  They were interested in how people decide whether they trust a recommendation based on the combination of the expertise of the judge and the confidence of the judge in his or her recommendation.

They had people read a restaurant review for a new restaurant.  The man making the recommendation was either described as a real expert (a nationally renowned critic published in major newspapers) or as a non-expert (a local administrator who has his own food blog).  The text of the review also mentioned something about the reviewer’s expertise.

In the review itself, the reviewer expressed either a high degree of confidence in his review or a low degree of confidence.  For example, the reviewer might say he had eaten at the restaurant several times and felt very certain about his recommendation, or he might say that he had only eaten there once and felt tentative about making a recommendation.

The researchers found that people were more likely to trust a reviewer when the combination of the level of expertise and the degree of confidence was surprising.  That is, they tended to trust the non-expert reviewer more when he was very confident than when he was not so confident.  In contrast, they tended to trust the expert reviewer more when he was tentative than when he was very confident.

An interesting aspect of this increased trust is that when people were surprised about the combination of expertise and confidence, they read the review more carefully and paid more attention to good arguments than to poor arguments in the recommendation.  

This work suggests that our reaction to recommendations may be strongly swayed by factors that might not be optimal for making good decisions.  That is, experts are often better able than non-experts to isolate factors that affect whether people will find an experience enjoyable.  A confident expert ought to be a good source of information.  But, because we expect experts to be confident, we seem to distrust these recommendations to some degree.  Non-experts may be less able than experts to really determine what makes an experience enjoyable, though it probably does make sense to pay more attention to a very confident non-expert than to one who is tentative.

In the end, it is worth trying to find out more about the people giving us recommendations.  After all, there is a cost to each bad movie and each uninspiring meal.

Vice, virtue, and the box office.

It is summertime, and the movie studios trot out their summer blockbusters and comedies.  That’s what summer is all about.  In Texas, when it gets to be 102 outside, sitting in an air-conditioned movie theater is not such a bad thing.  But why are people flocking to movies that are clearly so awful.  The poster-child for awful movies this year is Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  The reviews of this movie are uniformly terrible, but the film has already done over $300 million in sales in the United States alone.  What gives?

We could assume that the critics are all just wrong.  But that doesn’t seem to be a complete explanation.  Everyone I know who saw this movie says it was a confused mass of metal.  So the hordes going to the movie must reflect something more basic about the way people make decisions.

The success of summer movies rests on what the behavioral economist George Loewenstein called vices  and virtues.  He’s not talking about the themes of movies here, but about the way people make their choice about the movie they want to see.  The vices in movies are all about the enjoyment.  The virtues are all about the value of the experience of seeing the movie.

Some of the vices in movies are thrills.  Car chases, explosions, and action heroes mowing down endless rows of evildoers are all vices.  Neatly-tied emotional experiences are vices as well.  The standard boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl plot of the standard romantic comedy is a vice.  We know by the closing credits the two beautiful stars will be locked in a kiss.  Familiarity is also a vice.  We are far more comfortable with remakes, sequels, and movies that come from familiar TV shows and toys than with things that are new.

Virtues are things that add value to the movie-going experience.  Learning something new is a virtue.  (Documentaries—even well-made documentaries—are chock-full of virtue.)  A complex emotional experience is a virtue.  Grappling with real-world issues is a virtue.  Movies with virtues are satisfying both in the theater and also long afterward.

Loewenstein suggests that people recognize the value of virtues, but when they are actually at the theater ready to buy a ticket, they invariably fall back on vices.  In one study, he gave people a coupon good for a free rental of a movie that they could pick up either that night or the next week.  They had to select the movie they wanted when they selected the coupon. They were given the choice of a virtue movie (Schindler’s List—a movie about the holocaust) or a vice movie (a low-brow comedy).  When people were choosing the movie they would watch next week, they tended to pick the virtue movie.  When they were choosing the movie they would watch that day, however, they would pick the vice movie.  In the moment of choice, people were worried that they would be bored, or sad, or generally not entertained.

Interestingly, movie delivery services like Netflix provide an interesting test of this explanation.  With Netflix, you set up a queue of movies and they get mailed to you.  So, you are choosing movies that you are going to watch some time in the future.  I find that I will put a documentary or a complex heavy “virtue” movie on my queue, and it will get mailed.  But then, it will sit at the house for a few weeks because the time never seems right to watch it.  Eventually we watch it, of course, and typically we really enjoy it and value the experience.  But in the moment of truth, it is hard to actually decide to watch it.

The same thing happens at the movie line over the summer.  In the end, we just want a pleasant experience at the movies.  So, even if the reviews are horrible, we end up valuing the potential thrills, comfort, and familiarity over the virtues of depth, complexity, and knowledge.