A Source You Prefer, or Majority? Investigating User Responses to Conflicting Opinions in Multi-Platform Restaurant-Review Lists

Customers learn about restaurants in various ways, and integrating this disparate information could give them access to a greater diversity of perspectives. Conflicting opinions between restaurant-review platforms are inevitable. However, such conflicts’ influences on users’ perceptions remain unclear, especially when the opinion of a user’s preferred platform conflicts with the majority of others. This study’s experiment with a sample of 304 users found that, when such situations occurred, the preferred platform’s influence differed depending on whether the user was shown a sequence of whole-platform aggregations vs. a sequence of individual reviews drawn from multiple platforms. That is, the participants accepted the majority view most of the time, but when looking at aggregated lists, if their preferred platform expressed a minority positive opinion based on a high quantity of reviews, that minority opinion could prevail over the majority one. Between-platform conflicts were also found to have a greater impact on user reactions than within-platform ones did.