So the problem with the emerging rating society in which we evaluate everything we experience and they evaluate us back is that our inclinations are reflected in everything we rate. These assessments may be useful indicators, but are far from objective. There is an argument that says the more information we have, the better the decisions we will make. But as with all data, if the sources and their personal proclivities are not fully explained, the 'data' are no better than an advertisement or a whiff of the air. The question is why this knowledge leads to assume that something quantified and posted on a website is inherently better than any other source - and what advantage others may be taking of it. JL
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reports in The Guardian:
The peer-to-peer economy is to a large degree an economy of reputation. Although most things are normally distributed, ratings are usually skewed, particularly when raters are not motivated to be entirely honest. Furthermore, unless there is a high number of raters, ratings will often say more about the raters themselves than the rated object, service or person.
Uber drivers are motivated to offer a better customer experience by being rated by every passenger at the end of each journey. Likewise, their passengers are incentivised to behave politely because their drivers rate them in turn. A recent version of the Uber app even allows passengers to see those ratings. And although anyone – driver or passenger – can have a bad day, it is valuable to see a person’s average rating, namely to describe, with a simple and standardised measure, how good a passenger or driver he or she is. It sums up how people behaved in the past, and predicts how they are likely to behave in the future.
But perhaps the most attractive element of this system is that it puts pressure on people to gain and maintain a desirable reputation, something they may not feel compelled to do otherwise. I go to great lengths to maintain my almost perfect 4.9 Uber rating, but I don’t really care what regular taxi drivers think of me – a feeling that appears to be mutual.
The peer-to-peer economy is fuelled not just by technology, but also trust, and peer ratings are the best way to assess the potential outcome of any transaction between people. In fact, the peer-to-peer economy is to a large degree an economy of reputation. The only reason we feel comfortable entering into a commercial or personal relationship with a total stranger is that we can trust his or her reputational score. Whether it’s buying a rare vintage watch on eBay, spending a week in a Paris Airbnb, or outsourcing the design of our company website through TaskRabbit, ratings rule our world.
The controversial new app Peeple, a sort of Yelp for humans, attempts to take this to the next level by peer-reviewing the entire universe of human transactions – personal, commercial, and romantic. Originally it seemed it would be possible to use the app to rate people without their permission but the app’s developer U-turned after critics questioned the legal implications. Now it appears users can only submit positive reviews.Although the Peeple idea sounded extreme, many of our daily decisions are already mediated by peer feedback that quantifies the average experience previous users had with a given product, service or person. This is so much the case that it is often worse to have no reputation than to have a bad one. Thus diners may be more prone to eating in a poorly rated restaurant than in a non-rated one; recruiters more likely to hire someone with a low number of LinkedIn endorsements than someone who isn’t on LinkedIn, and travellers more inclined to book a poorly rated hotel on TripAdvisor than one that isn’t rated at all. It is a case of better the devil you know. Reputation is everything, and if we cannot crowdsource it or quantify something instantly, it doesn’t exist.
Reliance on reputation is nothing new. In the old days, people would pick a doctor, lawyer or spouse on the basis of their reputation, after consulting friends, families and acquaintances. With the advent of scientific management and the professional practice of human resources, organisations began to identify reputation proxies to evaluate and reward employee performance: from customer service feedback in call centres to 360-degree surveys in managers and senior executives.There is also a robust scientific basis underpinning these practices. First, we know that despite short-term situational pressures and the contextual demands on behaviour, people behave fairly consistently across situations. For example, regardless of context, funny people are generally funny; honest people are generally honest.
Second, personality psychology provides 100 years of scientific evidence on what the fundamental ingredients of individual differences in behaviour are, which is like finding the core elements of chemistry (but for human behaviour instead).
Although these elements have been accurately measured through scientific personality assessments for decades, they can also be measured by observer ratings. Ongoing feedback on a person’s performance is to that person’s personality what an ongoing description of the weather is to the climate of that place: it is just a micro-level measure of it. Thus most ratings capture what people do, but personality tests predict what they are likely to do, as well as explaining why.
That said, the ubiquitous ratings society is far from perfect. Although most things are normally distributed, ratings are usually skewed, particularly when raters are not motivated to be entirely honest. Furthermore, unless there is a high number of raters, ratings will often say more about the raters themselves than the rated object, service or person.
It is impossible for most people to have great taste. As Oscar Wilde famously noted, “Everything popular is wrong”, so when you are a true expert or connoisseur at something, the utility of mainstream or crowdsourced ratings disappears. If you love cinema you will probably disagree with most of the top-grossing movies in history; if you love music you will not have the most popular Spotify songs in your playlist; and if you know a city really well you will not look at Urbanspoon before deciding where to eat.
Likewise, even if mobile dating apps systematically collected feedback on previous daters’ experiences with a candidate, that does not necessarily mean that you would have a similar impression if you dated them. Consensual data is generally more objective but it does not completely eliminate subjectivity – nor does it abolish subjective preferences that fail to conform to it. In any event, we should not pretend that the absence of reputational data would make us fairer, less prejudiced, or even more spontaneous. Humans are prewired to judge, and when we don’t have reliable metrics on a target’s reputation, we let our prejudiced attitudes and unconscious biases take over. So, even if you like the idea of going with the flow and following your gut feeling, the value of accessing a fairly robust source of independent and empirically based information should not be underestimated.
Now please don’t rate this post (unless you like it).
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