Why do we trust strangers' reviews? The puzzle of anonymous trust

Walking into a shop because strangers gave it 4 stars

You're walking through an unfamiliar town looking for lunch. In front of you are 2 ramen shops. One has 4.2 stars on a review site, and the other has 3.1 stars. Which one do you go into?

Most people would pick the 4.2-star shop. But if you think about it calmly, it's strange. The people who gave those stars are people you've never met, whose names and faces you don't know. You don't even know whether their taste matches yours. And yet you trust their ratings and act on them.

This behavior of trusting strangers' ratings is a very recent thing in human history. Before the internet spread, people mostly relied on word of mouth from people they knew. If a friend told you "That place is good," you'd believe it, but there were hardly any chances to hear strangers' opinions in the first place.

The internet changed this completely. Now we make decisions almost every day based on the opinions of strangers.

The power of numbers creates trust

One reason we trust strangers' ratings is the power of numbers. If 1 person says "It's delicious," you're only half convinced, but if 100 people say "It's delicious," you believe it. Even if you can't trust each reviewer on their own, when many opinions agree, you tend to judge that the information is worth trusting.

This is a phenomenon called the wisdom of crowds. In 1906, the statistician Francis Galton made an interesting discovery at a livestock fair. In a contest where about 800 visitors guessed the weight of an ox, the individual guesses were all over the place, but the value that combined everyone's guesses almost matched the actual weight. Galton published this observation the following year, in 1907, in the scientific journal Nature.

The star ratings on review sites work on the same principle. Individual reviews are biased, but the average of a large number of reviews is often quite close to reality. Without realizing it, we trust this wisdom of crowds.

In a question box too, when the same question arrives from several people, you feel that "everyone must be curious about this." The same question from several people gives you a stronger reason to answer than a question from 1 person. The power of numbers works in question boxes as well.

We trust them because they have nothing to gain

Another reason is that we feel anonymous reviewers have nothing to gain.

Even if a shop's official website says "Our ramen is outstanding," you think, "Well, of course they'd say that about their own shop." But when a stranger on a review site writes "The ramen here is outstanding," you feel, "This person has no connection to the shop, so they're probably writing what they really think."

The opinions of third parties with nothing to gain tend to feel more objective than the opinions of the people involved. This is one of the reasons anonymous reviews are trusted.

Question box answers have the same effect. To readers, an answer in a personal question box that shares what it was like to actually use something feels more trustworthy than a company's official FAQ. The reassurance that "this person isn't saying it to advertise" makes the answer more convincing.

Of course, not every anonymous review can be trusted. Stealth marketing and fake reviews meant to drag down competitors exist too. But the mental shortcut "anonymous means nothing to gain, which means trustworthy" is deeply rooted in many people.

What makes a question box a place of trust

Whether the Q&A in a question box is trusted depends on how the owner answers.

The mark of a trusted answer is honesty. You talk honestly about the bad points as well as the good ones. When someone asks "Any book recommendations?", you honestly write, "This book was interesting, but the second half dragged a bit." Talking about both the good and the bad builds trust that "this person is answering honestly."

On the other hand, if every answer is positive and there's nothing negative at all, readers start to wonder, "Are they telling the truth?" It's the same reason reviews from people who only ever give 5 stars on review sites are hard to trust.

Honestly saying "I don't know" also builds trust. If you can say "I don't know much about that, so I can't say for sure," your other answers become more trustworthy than if you answered every question with full confidence.

In the end, whether we believe a stranger's words comes down to judging whether that person is honest. Building up honest answers in your question box is the most reliable way to build trust with your followers.