The Love of Large Numbers: A Popularity Bias in Consumer Choice
Powell first author, not Holyoak. The authors built an intuitive statistician model using a prior derived from millions of retail reviews, then compared its predictions with participants' choices in a task designed to pit statistical information against social information. Under certain conditions people preferred a product with more reviews and a higher average, although the model indicated that the one with fewer reviews was likely better. The authors conclude participants failed to make meaningful statistical inferences.
Powell first author, not Holyoak. The authors built an intuitive statistician model using a prior derived from millions of retail reviews, then compared its predictions with participants' choices in a task designed to pit statistical information against social information. Under certain conditions people preferred a product with more reviews and a higher average, although the model indicated that the one with fewer reviews was likely better. The authors conclude participants failed to make meaningful statistical inferences.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-18.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Powell, D., Yu, J., DeWolf, M., & Holyoak, K. J. (2017). The Love of Large Numbers: A Popularity Bias in Consumer Choice. Psychological Science, 28(10), 1432-1442. doi:10.1177/0956797617711291.