1 . Do you use online ratings and reviews to decide which products and services to buy? Well, we just found out that those ratings may not always lead to the best choices.

Online reviews should be helping us make good decisions about what to spend our money on. However, they do help us make decisions — just not necessarily the best ones, according to a new study led by Derek Powell, PhD of Stanford University.

Specifically, the study reveals that we tend to buy a product that has more reviews than a product that has less, even if the product with more reviews has lower ratings. When given a choice between two products that have equally bad reviews, we’re still willing to buy the one with more reviews. Dr. Powell asked several hundred people to look at a series of cell phone cases, presented in pairs along with the average user rating and number of reviews for each case, and then indicated which they preferred. The result was that the participants tended to choose the case that had more reviews, rather than better reviews.

This herd-mentality is a function of social learning, the process by which new behaviors are learned through observing the behavior of others: “The Internet now provides social evidence on an unprecedented scale. However, properly adopting this evidence requires a capacity for statistical inference.”

“Consumers try to use information about other people’s experiences to make good choices, and retailers (零售商) have an motivation to channel consumers toward products they will be satisfied with,” Dr. Powell added. “Our data suggest that retailers might need to rethink how reviews are presented and consumers might need to do more to educate themselves about how to use reviews to guide their choices. That includes absorbing the idea that a larger number of reviews is not a reliable indicator of a product’s quality.