RESTAURANT REVIEWS AND TWO-WAYS BIAS

If a judgment is “biased” it’s not worth considering, right?
The adjective itself indicates a preference or prejudice towards something or someone, encouraged only by one’s personal opinions and not supported by facts or empirical evidence.

Yet, there is one popular thing despite being quintessentially biased: restaurant reviews.

Dealing with the list of reasons why restaurant reviews can’t be “unbiased” is impossible: it would take (literally) days. But then why are they so popular?

Well, my personal (and humble, needless to say!) opinion is that biases don’t affect solely who write the reviews, since also those who read them are “part of the scheme”, so to speak.

I found three biases in particular:

- “Argumentum ad judicium”: if out of 10,000 people who review, most concern a positive (or negative) judgment, then it will be the one that comes closest to the truth.
We are inclined to think that “the majority cannot be wrong.” Whatever the topic.

- We all love narrative. Much more than boring numbers and cold statistics. That’s why we not only look at the average score but also read about experiences. It is enough for one of these to strike one of our nerves (hygiene, the courtesy of the waiters, the size of the portions or whatever). and our traffic light, green or red, is activated.

- Reviews arise from personal opinions, which are (in the vast majority of cases) subject to bias. But we don’t know that.
We are afflicted with “projection bias”. We assume that others share our thinking patterns, attitudes, and judgment criteria.

Soooo…. if you work in catering industry and/or hospitality industry and you are interested in my copywriting and/or content writing services, just DM me!