A long‐term archival analysis of social influence on online wine evaluations: Effects of consensus and expertise

Abstract

AbstractWhen forming opinions, people often rely on the behaviours and beliefs of others; this phenomenon has been understood by social psychologists as ‘social influence’. Online evaluations of goods provide a naturalistic context in which to investigate social influence. We collected information from 20,397 notes about 209 wines posted on a wine social networking site over the course of 10 years to examine the social influence on wine evaluations. Our analyses provide evidence for both normative and informational social influence on online wine evaluations. However, normative influence outweighs the effect of judgements made by experts. The influence of prior evaluations is strongest for the first few individuals who post their notes, and social influence increases as a function of source uniformity. Furthermore, expert members' evaluations are not more influential than other individuals' evaluations. Our results provide evidence for significant effects of social influence in an applied setting, impacting wine consumers that are exposed to the opinions of others, and have implications for how goods are advertised online. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.