Fresh or Rotten? How the Majority Influences our Movie-Watching Experience.
Have you ever decided not to watch a movie just because of the reviews? This isn’t uncommon because the influence others have in the decision-making process is strong. Human psychology sees the influence of the majority being a critical factor in one’s actions. This is best seen in reading film reviews to determine the quality of a movie and how it can create an information cascade of interest.
Delving into the film and television review website Rotten Tomatoes, the Tomatometer scored made by a collective of global film critics can make or break for the popular media. Typically, people are more willing to see films with high Tomatometer scores listed as “Fresh” over low scores listed as “Rotten,” as indicated by the red tomato and green splatter. This is made apparent in one of my favorite movies Paddington (2014) with a Fresh score of 97%, and a movie I don’t plan on seeing Eternals (2021) with a Rotten score of 46%. The former has 4 Rotten reviews out of the 164 critic reviews while the latter has 155 Rotten out of 336 critic reviews.
The information cascade of interest would go as follows. Suppose there’s an experiment in which an individual could only read the reviews at random and was unaware of the Tomatometer score. The participants could hear the announced score from the previous participants. If the first person reads a Rotten review, then they will guess a Majority of Rotten reviews for the movie, thus decreasing their chance of watching it. On the other hand, if the first person reads a Fresh review, then they will guess a Majority of Fresh reviews for the movie, thus increasing their chance of watching it. For the second person, they could select the same score as announced by the first person or select a different score than that announced by the first person, thus showing how this person chooses the score according to the review they receive. However, if the first and second people chose the same score, the subsequent people are likely to follow their announced scores no matter the review they read. If the first and second chose differently, the third would guess the score depending on the rating and the subsequent will be influenced by the majority. This phenomenon is noted in Dellarocas et al. 2007, in which “positive online review posts encourage other consumers to adopt products whereas negative opinions discourage them.”
Informational learning is pivotal in leading people to watch a movie, but the cascade can be disrupted by more information being given to the participants and the intuition of people in the real world. If people don’t let the decisions of others influence them, then they can go against the wave of the information cascade by making a choice dependent on their own accords. By being aware of the bias in reviews, one could render the influence of film critics as being powerless.