Some Hedonic Consequences of Perspective‐Taking in Recommending

Abstract

What do people enjoy about making recommendations? Although recommendation recipients can gain useful information, the value of these exchanges for the information provider is less clear in comparison. In this article we test whether a common recommendation heuristic—egocentric projection—also has hedonic consequences, by conducting experiments that compare recommendations (suggestions for another person) to reviews, in which people merely express their own preferences. Over five studies, people preferred reviewing over recommending. Recommenders enjoyed themselves less when they had to take their recipients' perspective, to the extent that the recipients' tastes were different from their own. These results suggest that self‐expression can be intrinsically rewarding for recommendation makers, and that recommendation seekers can elicit more information by asking for reviews instead.

Making sense of recommendations

“…Recommender systems also suffer from start‐up problems in new applications, when the database of previous ratings is small, or sparse. In practice, the accuracy of recommender systems may also be bounded by their strategies to collect user ratings, suggesting questions for future work on the behavioral aspects of review elicitation (Avery, Resnick, & Zeckhauser, ; Berger, ; Burtch, Hong, Bapna, & Griskevicius, ; Yeomans, ).…”

Featuring Mistakes: The Persuasive Impact of Purchase Mistakes in Online Reviews

“…Because we want to better understand how the content of communication shapes its ability to persuade, the communications in our experiments will be presented as reviews yet worded as recommendations that prescribe a certain course of action to allow us to measure the degree to which our participants are persuaded (cf. Yeomans 2019).…”

Consumers as creative agents: How required effort influences willingness to engage

“…A total of 164 undergraduates (59.76% women, three participants preferred not to disclose their gender, and one participant indicated no option that applied to them; M age = 20.81, SD = 1.89, four participants did not provide their age) at a North American university participated in exchange for course credit. As an attention check, we asked all participants to ignore 13 listed items about activities and instead type “I will pay attention” in the space next to “Other” (Yeomans, 2019). Twenty‐six participants failed to pass the attention check, and their data were removed from further analysis.…”

“…Instead of checking participants' attention at the beginning (as we did in Experiment 1), Experiment 2 checked their attention after the dependent variable measure. Aside from the instructional manipulation check question that was adopted in Experiment 1 (see Oppenheimer et al, 2009; Yeomans, 2019), we asked participants to answer “How serious were you in completing this questionnaire?” (1 = “not at all serious,” 7 = “very serious”). Those participants with scores on seriousness less than four were excluded.…”