raising awareness that something is popular might have unintended negative consequences. In the paper “The Paradox of Publicity,” researchers Balazs Kovacs and Amanda J. Sharkey compared more than thirty-eight thousand book reviews on Goodreads.com. They found that titles that won prestigious awards got worse reviews than books that were merely nominated for the same awards. In a perfect social-influence world, this would make no sense. If an authority figure tells you a book is good, you ought to internalize the advice and adore the book. But the real world is more complex than that, and
raising awareness that something is popular might have unintended negative consequences. In the paper “The Paradox of Publicity,” researchers Balazs Kovacs and Amanda J. Sharkey compared more than thirty-eight thousand book reviews on Goodreads.com. They found that titles that won prestigious awards got worse reviews than books that were merely nominated for the same awards. In a perfect social-influence world, this would make no sense. If an authority figure tells you a book is good, you ought to internalize the advice and adore the book. But the real world is more complex than that, and there are several intuitive reasons why a book award might lead to worse ratings. Prizes naturally raise expectations, and heightened expectations often go unmet. What’s more, prestigious prizes attract a larger and more diverse audience, and this broad composition will include people who have no taste for the book’s genre or style and are reading it only for the award sticker. These readers will dependably leave worse reviews. Meanwhile, a book that’s merely nominated for the same prize might not attract the same motley coalition of readers, so its ratings won’t suffer so much. But the researchers’ most interesting explanation is that prizewinners attract lower ratings because of a backlash among the book’s readers. “Consistent with work in the area of fads and fashion, we found that growth in audience size, or popularity, can itself be seen as distasteful or a reason to give a lower eva...
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Why my favorite works are often four star reviews on Amazon, while a few which are really niche have five star reviews. But for more popular works, it's likely four stars. Different for goods with more "objective" quality dimensions, like kitchen tools.
