Early Online Reviews Are Often Too Kind. Here’s Why

Before booking a hotel, choosing a restaurant, or buying a product, most of us do the same thing: we check online reviews. The star ratings on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other platforms have become a quick way to decide whether to trust a place or not. But do those stars truly reflect what consumers have experienced?

Not necessarily. Research has long pointed to a “positivity problem”: online reviews tend to skew toward the positive end of the scale. But explaining why this happens is more complicated. It’s not enough to assume that customers are generally satisfied or that reviewers want to prove they’re experts. There may be something much more human at play: when we enter a new digital community, we worry about the impression we’ll make on others.

This is the starting point of “Starting Positive: The Impact of Self-Presentation Concerns on Consumer Reviews,” a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors include Andrea Ordanini (Department of Marketing and BNP Paribas Professor of Marketing and Service Analytics at Bocconi University), Elisa Solinas of IE University Madrid, Francesca Valsesia of the University of Washington, and Joseph C. Nunes of the University of Southern California.

When we’re new to something, we prefer to start off on a positive note

The central finding suggests a new possible interpretation. Reviewers do not necessarily become more critical as they gain experience. Rather, when they have just started using a platform, they tend to be more reluctant to post negative experiences. As they accumulate reviews, this hesitation drops.

In the Yelp data, considering users active enough to have written at least 20 reviews, for every 10 additional reviews, the probability that the next rating will fall into a higher category rather than a lower one decreases by about 7.1%. The phenomenon also emerges on TripAdvisor, where the authors replicate it by getting through 80,920 reviews posted by 4,046 reviewers.

This finding differs from the well-known phenomenon in which reviews of the same product tend to worsen over time. Here, the behavior of the same person changes across different products and experiences: at the beginning of their “career” as a reviewer, people tend to withhold negative judgments more; later on, they publish them more readily.

The fear is not of appearing incompetent, but of appearing unlikable

Why would someone keep a bad experience to themselves? The explanation proposed by the paper concerns self-presentation—that is, the way we try to control the image others have of us.

Previous research had already examined reviewers’ desire to appear competent: criticizing, distinguishing, and demonstrating refined tastes can be a way to signal experience. Solinas, Valsesia, Nunes, and Ordanini, however, shift the focus to another fundamental dimension of social judgment: “warmth,” which we could translate as cordiality or amiability.

When we join a platform and have only one or two reviews associated with our profile, each new review carries a lot of weight in defining who we appear to be. A scathing review can make us seem more negative, less friendly, and less “warm.” After twenty or thirty reviews, however, a single review counts for much less in building our reputation.

As the authors write, on online platforms:

“a concern with appearing to lack warmth can result in potentially useful information being withheld rather than shared with others.”

The experiments are designed precisely to distinguish this explanation from the alternatives. In one of them, participants were more willing to post a negative review when they imagined they already had many reviews associated with their profile. But when they switched to a new platform—and thus encountered a new audience to whom they had to reintroduce themselves—that reluctance reappeared. It’s not just how much experience we have as reviewers that matters; it’s how much of a history we’ve built with that specific audience.

Studies also show that the evaluation of the experience itself does not change. Those with few reviews do not give more stars to the same restaurant than those with many; they are simply less willing to make a negative review public.

Anonymity brings out criticism

If the issue is personal image, one solution might be to temporarily remove the profile from the equation. In one experiment, among those who did not have the option to post anonymously, 51% of participants with few reviews decided not to post a negative review. Among reviewers with many reviews, that percentage drops to 31%. When the option to review anonymously is added, however, that gap virtually disappears: 17% of “new” reviewers choose not to post, compared to 22% of users with a longer history.

It’s not hard to see the implication for Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other review platforms. If a criticism can be separated—at least in some cases—from the reviewer’s public identity, the perceived social cost of saying “this experience was terrible” decreases.

To get more negative reviews, ask for something positive!

The second solution the researchers found is more general one: to convince people to post a negative review, it can be helpful to ask them to also write something positive. In another experiment, participants who were simply asked to describe a bad experience once again revealed the gap between new and experienced reviewers. But when they were explicitly asked to also mention a positive aspect of the experience, the gap disappeared almost entirely. The willingness to post a negative review became essentially the same among those with few reviews and those with many, without changing the number of stars awarded.

The logic is clear : being able to say “the service was terrible, even though the place was pleasant” allows the reviewer to express a negative opinion without fear of appearing systematically hostile or lacking in humanity. The platform thus obtains more critical information without asking users to artificially soften their ratings. On the contrary, reminding people that a negative review “helps the community” or that other users post criticism does not work nearly as well. Effective interventions are those that directly address the concern that drives self-censorship: How will I appear in the eyes of others?

Stars also tell us who we are

The study thus leads to a broader conclusion about online reviews. A rating does not merely reflect the relationship between a customer and a hotel, restaurant, or product. It also reflects the relationship between the reviewer and the audience they imagine they are addressing. And platforms—which are increasingly turning into small social networks with profiles, photos, comments, likes, and personal stories—may inadvertently amplify the very concerns about self-presentation that make reviews less comprehensive.

In fact, the study sheds light on yet another aspect of the dynamics of the digital world:

“online ratings may also be biased by self-serving motives, and a self-presentation bias more specifically” (p. 318).

In other words, when we see a four-and-a-half-star rating, we aren’t necessarily looking at customer satisfaction alone. We might also be seeing the result of all the criticism that someone—especially early on—chose not to post. And for platforms that have built their value on the promise of aggregating authentic user experiences, understanding that silence can be just as important as counting the stars.