Thread:Talk:Article feedback/IMDB rating: Only consider trustworthy users/reply (27)

Subfader, you may not be aware of it but market research deals with FAR, FAR more than just selling products. Pretty much anything that involves getting people's opinion on the matter has its root in market research principles.

But to go with your coffee example, you could gleam a lot from such a glib answer to the question of whether the machine is trustworthy. If you see a pattern of 5/5 stars given simply on the basis of the coffee being hot than you obviously know that "hotness" is intimately equated in the consumer's mind with a trustworthy machine. So you better believe that coffee machine engineers would focus on that angle.

Similarly, if we see a pattern of "trustworthiness" for articles with only news article internet sources (versus offline sources or academic journals) being consistently rated low, we may be able to gleam that readers put more faith in articles that appear to be sourced to books published by reputable publishing houses or recognizable academic journals, etc.

The above is just a hypothetical and again, patterns are what we are looking for. But you can't see any patterns unless you start asking the questions.