Is It as Bad as It Looks? Judgments of Quantitative Scores Depend on Their Presentation Format

Firms like Uber, Amazon, and TripAdvisor have popularized the rating of people, goods, and services. These entities receive scores (e.g., through online reviews) in a variety of presentation formats: incremental (a raw score per episode; e.g., 5–5–2), cumulative (updated average scores; e.g., 5–5–4), or a combination thereof. This article focuses on prevalent situations in which a score deviates from prior scores and examines how the presentation format of the scores impacts decision makers’ (e.g., consumers, managers) evaluations of the entity scored. Across a wide variety of settings, nine experiments document that when a generally well-performing (poorly performing) entity suddenly receives a negative (positive) score, overall performance will be perceived as less negative (positive) when shown in a cumulative format compared with an incremental or combined format. This effect appears to be stronger when the deviating episode is more representative (e.g., due to higher recency or internal attribution). The authors also find evidence for their proposed explanation: a cumulative format distorts individuals’ perceptions of the underlying raw score of the deviating episode. These findings imply that presenting scores in alternative formats may affect marketing outcomes (e.g., customer churn, product choice, technology adoption, new product success, and user engagement on peer-to-peer platforms).