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Do audiences question negative reviews? Are they more interested in praise than in pans? Do they find one kind of review more credible than another? This experiment assessed subjects' interest in positive, mixed or negative reviews and their perceptions of review credibility. A “non-review” containing no evaluative adjectives served as a control. Positive reviews and non-reviews were found significantly more interesting than mixed and negative reviews but not significantly more credible.
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Wyatt et al. (1987) studied this question.
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