faux saint laurent bag

Human beings have always loved reviews: word of mouth has long been regarded as one of the most valuable marketing tools available to a company. But the internet has made us all review mad. We love giving reviews, and we have grown to depend on them, too. Researchers have found that more than 99 percent of consumers read reviews online before they shop, and nearly three quarters of consumers say they've left an online review for a local business in the past year. Not only do we read a lot of reviews before we purchase anything these days, we also believe them: 49 percent of consumers say they trust reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from friends and family members. And younger people are particularly fond of reviews: 91 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds say they trust online reviews every bit as much as they do personal recommendations. Shabnam Azimi and Alexander Krasnikov of Loyola University of Chicago and Kwong Chan of Northeastern University recently published a study about how fake reviews manage to fool us. "This is what happens in real life," Azimi says. "The writers of those fake reviews, sometimes they're hired by companies. They get paid a high amount of money and they have to sound pretty real." And not just to write a glowing review of a product or a hotel. "You can always hire somebody to write a negative review about your competition," she points out. When asked why they thought a bad review was trustworthy, participants revealed that they assumed that a negative diatribe about a company would be more truthful than a glowing endorsement. They didn't fully account for the possibility that the reviewer might want to harm the business. But there is no scientific support for any of these hypotheses or approaches. In fact, the science suggests that our ability to detect lying vs. truthful witnesses is mediocre, at best. And that's when we're face to face with someone. So how do we stand a chance when we're reading something online, and we aren't able to see a person's mannerisms or expressions? It could be that without those distractions, we might do better at identifying fakes. There is a theory that it's easier to determine whether someone is telling the truth when one reads the account of what they say, rather than seeing them say it. Finally, the study authors wanted to see whether there was a certain type of person that was more susceptible, or more capable of detecting fakes. So they selected participants that conformed to the Big Five personality types: extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. It turns out that people who display openness, and tend to be adventurous and intellectually curious, are better at spotting fake reviews than other personality types. Extroverted people, on the other hand, tend to have a harder time identifying a fake review. faux saint laurent bag