Emotional Bias
Our emotional state colors our perception and experience of everything we come in contact with, biasing our responses and opinions. How we feel can change day by day or even minute by minute depending on a variety of external and internal influences. We have all had the experience of disliking a movie when we were in a bad mood only to discover months later that it's actually quite good.

If we are providing feedback on our experience of a product or service, our emotional state at the time of evaluation can have a major influence on our evaluation. This is also part of the reason why asking people what they think is so often a poor predictor of what they actually do.

Gaming Bias
Another type of reviewer is someone who is "gaming" the system. Sometimes such gaming is malicious, but often it's altruistic. While writing this article I went onto Amazon to look at the reviews of a book I co-authored called Wired for Speech. The first one was very positive; perhaps someone my coauthor knows. But I have no doubts about the second 5-star review, titled "Amazing Insight." To my surprise, it was from my dad! Enough said.

Gaming such as this is actually the rule, rather than the exception on Amazon and other media sites where products have authors or artists and personal connections abound. I admit to having given 5-stars to articles on my company... heck, if I can do it for this one I will. Go ahead, try it out, give this five stars if you can.

Time-Delay Bias
A problem that layers on top of all the above has to do with time. Unfortunately, feedback is never completely up-to-date. By the time the data is collected and analyzed, the recommendations may be wholly inaccurate. Trends and fads come and go in a matter of weeks or even days. News stories rise and fall in popularity in a matter of hours or minutes; it is nearly impossible to keep up unless you use a technology that automatically adapts recommendations in real-time.

Ratings and reviews can suffer from similar time-delay problems. Imagine a scathing review of a small bed-and-breakfast which the owner has made changes to accommodate and therefore is no longer valid. My wife and I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in New Zealand where this is precisely what happened. The owner was distraught and felt it had a negative impact on his business even though he had made all the improvements he could.

Multiplier Bias
What if everyone's movie decisions relied solely on the basis of how many other people have seen it or how much money it has made? The situation degrades into "herd behavior" and effectively becomes random group movements. This can happen any time the feedback mechanism is tied to the action itself. For example, recommending products based on those that are purchased most often. The more people who purchase it, the more others are encouraged to purchase it. Even if mechanisms are in place to take returns into account, not everyone returns a bad product. Things become self-fulfilling.

Recommendation systems based solely on clicks and page views have a similar problem. The more people who click on a page, the more others are encouraged to do the same. It quickly degrades into randomness.

Tapping the Wisdom of Your Silent Majority
With all of these biases, should we completely avoid strategies like expert recommendations and user-generated reviews? Not necessarily. If done with appropriate care, merchandizing and editorializing can be helpful guides. Ratings and reviews, though potentially misleading, have become an expected part of the user experience online and encourage deeper engagement with and consideration of products and services.

There is another strategy, however, that sidesteps bias and provides both an accurate and comprehensive window into user need and interest by leveraging the wealth of information embedded in the everyday online behaviors of website visitors. Every successful or failed search, every page visited or revisited, every purchase or abandoned cart carries with it valuable information that is typically ignored or relegated to reports with unclear consequences. These natural online behaviors represent your true and unbiased community - the "silent majority" of your website visitors that normally go unspoken for.

Through analyzing the patterns embedded in these implicit community behaviors, and then automatically modifying both on-page recommendation links as well as search results, companies can effectively tap into this community wisdom. When a user comes to your website with a particular need or interest, focus on the experiences of the entire visitor community to identify other like-minded peers and immediately surface the products and content that have proven valuable in the past.

Watch what people do (not what they say), include everyone, and pay particular attention to context. Behavioral science has always told us that is the best way to understand a community, their needs, and their interests. Bias may never be 100% avoidable, but by tapping into the wisdom of your silent majority, it is possible to guide visitors to content or products that satisfy their needs much faster than ever before.