Saturday, April 25, 2020

Book Blogger Hop April 24th - April 30th: 350.org Is an International Organization Dedicated to Addressing Climate Change


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Do the star ratings a book receives on Goodreads or retail sites affect whether you buy the book or not?

I want to say "not really", because I mostly don't pay attention to star ratings for books, especially on Goodreads since I am rarely on that site. However, I always make such statements with the caveat that we don't really know what affects our decision making. Research has shown that people's preferences can be changed by the addition of information in a subtle enough way that they don't even really notice. There is, in fact, an entire industry built around the idea that your preferences can be changed. It seems to be a fairly popular opinion that one is simply unaffected by things like advertising and other attempts to sway one to a particular product, but that assertion is simply implausible. We know from studies done on this topic that people are affected by these things in ways that they don't realize. To claim one is not is to ignore pretty much everything we've learned from decades of research by economists and psychologists.

The most I can really say is that I am not consciously affected by things like star ratings for books. The reality is that I can't really say one way or the other.


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