Tag Archives: opinion

Idea Soup

We Are All Always Right, All of the Time

You already know this: you believe that your opinion is correct all the time, about everything. And, interestingly enough, your friends and neighbors believe that they are always right too. Oh, and the colleague at the office with whom you argue all the time — she’s right all the time too.

How can this be, when in an increasingly science-driven, objective universe facts trump opinion? Well, not so fast. It seems that we humans have an internal mechanism that colors our views based on a need for acceptance within a broader group. That is, we generally tend to spin our rational views in favor of group consensus, versus supporting the views of a subject matter expert, which might polarize the group. This is both good and bad. Good because it reinforces the broader benefits of being within a group; bad because we are more likely to reject opinion, evidence and fact from experts outside of our group — think climate change.

From the Washington Post:

It’s both the coolest — and also in some ways the most depressing — psychology study ever.

Indeed, it’s so cool (and so depressing) that the name of its chief finding — the Dunning-Kruger effect — has at least halfway filtered into public consciousness. In the classic 1999 paper, Cornell researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that the less competent people were in three domains — humor, logic, and grammar — the less likely they were to be able to recognize that. Or as the researchers put it:

We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer from a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

Dunning and Kruger didn’t directly apply this insight to our debates about science. But I would argue that the effect named after them certainly helps to explain phenomena like vaccine denial, in which medical authorities have voiced a very strong opinion, but some parents just keep on thinking that, somehow, they’re in a position to challenge or ignore this view.

So why do I bring this classic study up now?

The reason is that an important successor to the Dunning-Kruger paper has just been come out — and it, too, is pretty depressing (at least for those of us who believe that domain expertise is a thing to be respected and, indeed, treasured). This time around, psychologists have not uncovered an endless spiral of incompetence and the inability to perceive it. Rather, they’ve shown that people have an “equality bias” when it comes to competence or expertise, such that even when it’s very clear that one person in a group is more skilled, expert, or competent (and the other less), they are nonetheless inclined to seek out a middle ground in determining how correct different viewpoints are.

Yes, that’s right — we’re all right, nobody’s wrong, and nobody gets hurt feelings.

The new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is by Ali Mahmoodi of the University of Tehran and a long list of colleagues from universities in the UK, Germany, China, Denmark, and the United States. And no wonder: The research was transnational, and the same experiment — with the same basic results — was carried out across cultures in China, Denmark, and Iran.

Read the entire story here.

Technica

The Pros and Cons of Online Reviews

There is no doubt that online reviews for products and services, from books to news cars to a vacation spot, have revolutionized shopping behavior. Internet and mobile technology has made gathering, reviewing and publishing open and honest crowdsourced opinion simple, efficient and ubiquitous.

However, the same tools that allow frank online discussion empower those wishing to cheat and manipulate the system. Cyberspace is rife with fake reviews, fake reviewers, inflated ratings, edited opinion, and paid insertions.

So, just as in any purchase transaction since the time when buyers and sellers first met, caveat emptor still applies.

[div class=attrib]From Slate:[end-div]

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way that buyers and sellers meet and interact in the marketplace. Online retailers make it cheap and easy to browse, comparison shop, and make purchases with the click of a mouse. The Web can also, in theory, make for better-informed purchases—both online and off—thanks to sites that offer crowdsourced reviews of everything from dog walkers to dentists.

In a Web-enabled world, it should be harder for careless or unscrupulous businesses to exploit consumers. Yet recent studies suggest that online reviewing is hardly a perfect consumer defense system. Researchers at Yale, Dartmouth, and USC have found evidence that hotel owners post fake reviews to boost their ratings on the site—and might even be posting negative reviews of nearby competitors.

The preponderance of online reviews speaks to their basic weakness: Because it’s essentially free to post a review, it’s all too easy to dash off thoughtless praise or criticism, or, worse, to construct deliberately misleading reviews without facing any consequences. It’s what economists (and others) refer to as the cheap-talk problem. The obvious solution is to make it more costly to post a review, but that eliminates one of the main virtues of crowdsourcing: There is much more wisdom in a crowd of millions than in select opinions of a few dozen.

Of course, that wisdom depends on reviewers giving honest feedback. A few well-publicized incidents suggest that’s not always the case. For example, when Amazon’s Canadian site accidentally revealed the identities of anonymous book reviewers in 2004, it became apparent that many reviews came from publishers and from the authors themselves.

Technological idealists, perhaps not surprisingly, see a solution to this problem in cutting-edge computer science. One widely reported study last year showed that a text-analysis algorithm proved remarkably adept at detecting made-up reviews. The researchers instructed freelance writers to put themselves in the role of a hotel marketer who has been tasked by his boss with writing a fake customer review that is flattering to the hotel. They also compiled a set of comparison TripAdvisor reviews that the study’s authors felt were likely to be genuine. Human judges could not distinguish between the real ones and the fakes. But the algorithm correctly identified the reviews as real or phony with 90 percent accuracy by picking up on subtle differences, like whether the review described specific aspects of the hotel room layout (the real ones do) or mentioned matters that were unrelated to the hotel itself, like whether the reviewer was there on vacation or business (a marker of fakes). Great, but in the cat-and-mouse game of fraud vs. fraud detection, phony reviewers can now design feedback that won’t set off any alarm bells.
Just how prevalent are fake reviews? A trio of business school professors, Yale’s Judith Chevalier, Yaniv Dover of Dartmouth, and USC’s Dina Mayzlin, have taken a clever approach to inferring an answer by comparing the reviews on two travel sites, TripAdvisor and Expedia. In order to post an Expedia review, a traveler needs to have made her hotel booking through the site. Hence, a hotel looking to inflate its rating or malign a competitor would have to incur the cost of paying itself through the site, accumulating transaction fees and tax liabilities in the process. On TripAdvisor, all you need to post fake reviews are a few phony login names and email addresses.

Differences in the overall ratings on TripAdvisor versus Expedia could simply be the result of a more sympathetic community of reviewers. (In practice, TripAdvisor’s ratings are actually lower on average.) So Mayzlin and her co-authors focus on the places where the gaps between TripAdvisor and Expedia reviews are widest. In their analysis, they looked at hotels that probably appear identical to the average traveler but have different underlying ownership or management. There are, for example, companies that own scores of franchises from hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton. Other hotels operate under these same nameplates but are independently owned. Similarly, many hotels are run on behalf of their owners by large management companies, while others are owner-managed. The average traveler is unlikely to know the difference between a Fairfield Inn owned by, say, the Pillar Hotel Group and one owned and operated by Ray Fisman. The study’s authors argue that the small owners and independents have less to lose by trying to goose their online ratings (or torpedo the ratings of their neighbors), reasoning that larger companies would be more vulnerable to punishment, censure, and loss of business if their shenanigans were uncovered. (The authors give the example of a recent case in which a manager at Ireland’s Clare Inn was caught posting fake reviews. The hotel is part of the Lynch Hotel Group, and in the wake of the fake postings, TripAdvisor removed suspicious reviews from other Lynch hotels, and unflattering media accounts of the episode generated negative PR that was shared across all Lynch properties.)

The researchers find that, even comparing hotels under the same brand, small owners are around 10 percent more likely to get five-star reviews on TripAdvisor than they are on Expedia (relative to hotels owned by large corporations). The study also examines whether these small owners might be targeting the competition with bad reviews. The authors look at negative reviews for hotels that have competitors within half a kilometer. Hotels where the nearby competition comes from small owners have 16 percent more one- and two-star ratings than those with neighboring hotels that are owned by big companies like Pillar.
This isn’t to say that consumers are making a mistake by using TripAdvisor to guide them in their hotel reservations. Despite the fraudulent posts, there is still a high degree of concordance between the ratings assigned by TripAdvisor and Expedia. And across the Web, there are scores of posters who seem passionate about their reviews.

Consumers, in turn, do seem to take online reviews seriously. By comparing restaurants that fall just above and just below the threshold for an extra half-star on Yelp, Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca estimates that an extra star is worth an extra 5 to 9 percent in revenue. Luca’s intent isn’t to examine whether restaurants are gaming Yelp’s system, but his findings certainly indicate that they’d profit from trying. (Ironically, Luca also finds that independent restaurants—the establishments that Mayzlin et al. would predict are most likely to put up fake postings—benefit the most from an extra star. You don’t need to check out Yelp to know what to expect when you walk into McDonald’s or Pizza Hut.)

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump:[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Mashable.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Are You Cold or Hot? Depends on Your Politics

The United States is gripped by political deadlock. The Do-Nothing Congress consistently gets lower approval ratings than our banks, Paris Hilton, lawyers and BP during the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. This stasis is driven by seemingly intractable ideological beliefs and a no-compromise attitude from both the left and right sides of the aisle.

So, it should come as no surprise that even your opinion of the weather and temperature is colored by your political persuasion.

Daniel Engber over at Slate sifts through some fascinating studies that highlight how our ingrained ideologies determine our worldview, down to even our basic view of the weather and our home thermostat setting.

[div class=attrib]From Slate:[end-div]

A few weeks ago, an academic journal called Weather, Climate and Society posted a curious finding about how Americans perceive the heat and cold. A team of researchers at the University of Oklahoma asked 8,000 adults living across the country to state both their political leanings and their impressions of the local weather. Are you a liberal or a conservative? Have average temperatures where you live been rising, falling, or staying about the same as previous years? Then they compared the answers to actual thermostat readings from each respondent’s ZIP code. Would their sense of how it feels outside be colored by the way they think?

Yes it would, the study found. So much so, in fact, that the people surveyed all but ignored their actual experience. No matter what the weather records showed for a given neighborhood (despite the global trend, it had gotten colder in some places and warmer in others), conservatives and liberals fell into the same two camps. The former said that temperatures were decreasing or had stayed the same, and the latter claimed they were going up. “Actual temperature deviations proved to be a relatively weak predictor of perceptions,” wrote the authors. (Hat tip to Ars Technica for finding the study.)

People’s opinions, then, seem to have an effect on how they feel the air around them. If you believe in climate change and think the world is getting warmer, you’ll be more inclined to sense that warmth on a walk around the block. And if you tend to think instead in terms of crooked scientists and climate conspiracies, then the local weather will seem a little cooler. Either way, the Oklahoma study suggests that the experience of heat and cold derives from “a complex mix of direct observation, ideology, and cultural cognitions.”

It’s easy to see how these factors might play out when people make grand assessments of the weather that rely on several years’ worth of noisy data. But another complex mix of ideology and culture affects how we experience the weather from moment to moment—and how we choose to cope with it. In yesterday’s column, I discussed the environmental case against air conditioning, and the belief that it’s worse to be hypothermic than overheated. But there are other concerns, too, that make their rounds among the anti-A/C brrr-geoisie. Some view air conditioning itself as a threat to their comfort and their health.

The notion that stale, recycled air might be sickening or dangerous has been circulating for as long as we’ve had home cooling. According to historian Marsha E. Ackermann’s Cool Comfort: America’s Romance With Air-Conditioning, the invention of the air conditioner set off a series of debates among high-profile scholars over whether it was better to fill a building with fresh air or to close it off from the elements altogether. One side argued for ventilation even in the most miserable summer weather; the other claimed that a hot, damp breeze could be a hazard to your health. (The precursor to the modern air conditioner, invented by a Floridian named John Gorrie, was designed according to the latter theory. Gorrie thought his device would stave off malaria and yellow fever.)

The cooling industry worked hard to promote the idea that A/C makes us more healthy and productive, and in the years after World War II it gained acceptance as a standard home appliance. Still, marketers worried about a lingering belief in the importance of fresh air, and especially the notion that the “shock effect” of moving too quickly from warm to cold would make you sick. Some of these fears would be realized in a new and deadly form of pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease. In the summer of 1976, around 4,000 members of the Pennsylvania State American Legion met for a conference at the fancy, air-conditioned Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, and over the next month, more than 180 Legionnaires took ill. The bacteria responsible for their condition were found to be propagating in the hotel’s cooling tower. Twenty-nine people died from the disease, and we finally had proof that air conditioning posed a mortal danger to America.

A few years later, a new diagnosis began to spread around the country, based on a nebulous array of symptoms including sore throats and headache that seemed to be associated with indoor air. Epidemiologists called the illness “Sick Building Syndrome,” and looked for its source in large-scale heating and cooling ducts. Even today, the particulars of the condition—and the question of whether or not it really exists—have not been resolved. But there is some good evidence for the idea that climate-control systems can breed allergenic mold or other micro-organisms. For a study published in 2004, researchers in France checked the medical records of 920 middle-aged women, and found that the ones who worked in air-conditioned offices (about 15 percent of the total pool) were almost twice as likely to take sick days or make a visit to an ear-nose-throat doctor.

This will come as no surprise to those who already shun the air conditioner and worship in the cult of fresh air. Like the opponents of A/C from a hundred years ago, they blame the sealed environment for creating a miasma of illness and disease. Well, of course it’s unhealthy to keep the windows closed; you need a natural breeze to blow all those spores and germs away. But their old-fashioned plea invites a response that’s just as antique. Why should the air be any fresher in summer than winter (when so few would let it in)? And what about the dangers that “fresh air” might pose in cities where the breeze swirls with soot and dust? A 2009 study in the journal Epidemiology confirmed that air conditioning can help stave off the effects of particulate matter in the environment. Researchers checked the health records of senior citizens who did or didn’t have air conditioners installed in their homes and found that those who were forced to leave their windows open in the summer—and suck down the dirty air outside—were more likely to end up in the hospital for pollution-related cardiovascular disease. Other studies have found similar correlations between a lack of A/C on sooty days and hospitalization for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Crosley Air Conditioning / Treehugger.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Which Couch, the Blue or White? Stubbornness and Social Pressure

Counterintuitive results show that we are more likely to resist changing our minds when more people tell us where are wrong. A team of researchers from HP’s Social Computing Research Group found that humans are more likely to change their minds when fewer, rather than more, people disagree with them.

[div class=attrib]From HP:[end-div]

The research has practical applications for businesses, especially in marketing, suggests co-author Bernardo Huberman,  Senior HP Fellow and director of HP’s Social Computing Research Group.

“What this implies,” he says, “is that rather than overwhelming consumers with strident messages about an alternative product or service, in social media, gentle reporting of a few people having chosen that product or service can be more persuasive.”

The experiment – devised by Huberman along with Haiyi Zhu, an HP labs summer intern from Carnegie Mellon University, and Yarun Luon of HP Labs – reveals several other factors that determine whether choices can be reversed though social influence, too. It’s the latest product of HP Lab’s pioneering program in social computing, which is dedicated to creating software and algorithms that provide meaningful context to huge sets of unstructured data.

Study results: the power of opinion
Opinions and product ratings are everywhere online. But when do they actually influence our own choices?

To find out, the HP team asked several hundred people to make a series of choices between two different pieces of furniture.  After varying amounts of time, they were asked to choose again between the same items, but this time they were told that a certain number of other people had preferred the opposite item.  (Separately, the experiment also asked subjects to choose between two different baby pictures, to control for variance in subject matter).

Analysis of the resulting choices showed that receiving a small amount of social pressure to reverse one’s opinion (by being told that a just few people had chosen differently) was more likely to produce a reversed vote than when the pressure felt was much greater (i.e. where an overwhelming number of people were shown as having made a different choice).

The team also discovered:

– People were more likely to be influenced if they weren’t prompted to change their mind immediately after they had expressed their original preference.
– The more time that people spent on their choice, the more likely they were to reverse that choice and conform to the opinion of others later on.

[div class=attrib]More of this fascinating article here.[end-div]