An analysis of three types of responses to negative hotel reviews finds that the response generally should follow the same principles as answering a customer complaint in person. Based on a series of hypothetical responses to a negative review, this study finds that inserting an empathy statement in response to the negative review improved the ratings of the response among a sample of university students. Likewise, this group of 176 potential customers rated the response more favorably when the response included a paraphrase of the complaint, thus making the response more personal and less generic. Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, our results indicate that the speed with which the hotel responds to an online complaint did not influence the survey participants’ rating of the response. The theoretical implications of these findings are that the online response should include same theoretical anchorings based on interactional justice and active listening that apply to face-to-face customer complaints. The major difference between an in-person complaint and an online review is that, in the review, the guest is not on premises waiting for a response, which changes the importance of the timing of a response and alters the perception of procedural justice, which supports the idea of a prompt response. This study further implies that hotel managers should include empathy or paraphrasing statements in their responses to online reviews.
People exhibit a bias blind spot: they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than in others. We report the development and validation of an instrument to measure individual differences in the propensity to exhibit the bias blind spot that is unidimensional, internally consistent, has high test-retest reliability, and is discriminated from measures of intelligence, decision-making ability, and personality traits related to self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-presentation. The scale is predictive of the extent to which people judge their abilities to be better than average for easy tasks and worse than average for difficult tasks, ignore the advice of others, and are responsive to an intervention designed to mitigate a different judgmental bias. These results suggest that the bias blind spot is a distinct metabias resulting from naïve realism rather than other forms of egocentric cognition, and has unique effects on judgment and behavior.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.