A Research Of Online Reviews' Impact On Consumers' Herding Behavior--Neuroscience Perspective

This study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural substrates of cognitive and psychological conflicts in consumer anti-herding and non-herding decisions, taking the example of purchasing books online. Sixteen participants were asked to decide to buy or not to buy a book as quickly as possible based on its title keyword, the numbers of positive reviews and negative reviews presented in stimulus. The given title keywords are very similar and the participants do not have special preference to anyone. The positive and negative review numbers are the whole information for participant decision. The percentage of the number of positive reviews in the total number of reviews was one among 0,25, 50, 75 and 100, corresponding to five categories of review consistency: absolute negative review, relative negative review, inconsistent review, relative positive review and absolute positive review. We examined all three possible purchasing strategies: buying the books in the context of consistent positive reviews or not buying the books in the context of consistent negative reviews (herding decision); buying the books in the context of consistent negative reviews or not buying the books in the context of consistent positive reviews (anti-herding decision); deciding to buy or not to buy the books randomly in the context of inconsistent reviews (non-herding decision).Results showed that remarkable late positive potential (LPP) - a component of ERP sensitive to categorization processes- was elicited. The LPP amplitudes varied as a function of review consistency. The LPP amplitudes for three categories of review consistency were significantly different and their order is absolute consistent review > relative consistent review > inconsistent review. Furthermore, anti-herding and non-herding decisions elicited more negative ERP deflections (N400 and N580) than did herding decisions between 400 and 600 ms. The N400 and N580 likely reflect the cognitive and psychological conflicts after making anti-herding and non-herding decisions.