Positive or Negative Reviews? Consumers’ Selective Exposure in Seeking and Evaluating Online Reviews

How and why positive and negative reviews influence product sales differently has critical implications for both research and businesses. Although earlier online word-of-mouth research empirically documented that negative reviews influence product sales to a greater extent than positive reviews (i.e., a negativity bias), later research has revealed that positive reviews are generally more helpful (i.e., a positivity bias). We propose that an answer to this conundrum may be that negative reviews get more exposure than positive reviews. As consumers are often overwhelmed by the massive number of online reviews, they need to be selective when searching for reviews. This research investigates consumers’ preference for positive vs. negative reviews during both the information-seeking and information-evaluation stages of their decision-making process. Drawing on the motivated reasoning literature, we propose that consumers exhibit a negativity bias when they search for reviews to read but manifest a confirmation bias when they evaluate the helpfulness of reviews. We conducted three experiments and found consistent support for these hypotheses. Our findings expand the current understanding of consumers’ processing of online reviews to the information-seeking stage, reveal differential biases at different stages, demonstrate a possible explanation for the negativity bias in product sales, and provide important practical implications.