Philip Fernbach
Cognitive scientist working on the limits of what people know and how confident they are about it.
Who they are
Fernbach is at the University of Colorado and co-authored the ratings study. His wider work concerns the gap between felt understanding and actual understanding, which is the same gap the ratings finding exposes.
Key papers
de Langhe, B., Fernbach, P. M., & Lichtenstein, D. R. (2016). Journal of Consumer Research, 42(6), 817-833.
Key ideas
A number that looks precise is trusted as a measurement regardless of what produced it.
The trust in average ratings appears to rest on an illusion of validity.
The practical consequence is that the review count is more informative than the score, and is the thing people skip.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1093/jcr/ucv047