Terms Governing Review Sorting Ritual
A field guide to the practice of sorting product reviews by a specific criterion before reading them, and the interpretive framework this creates.
Field Guide to Review Sorting Ritual Consumer Behavior Documentation Unit August 2021
This field guide documents the review sorting ritual, defined here as the practice of reordering a product's customer reviews according to a chosen criterion before reading them, and the distinct interpretive experience each sort order produces. The guide is intended for researchers entering the field and for consumers who have been conducting this ritual for years without naming it.
What the Field Researcher Will Encounter
A product is listed. It has reviews. The default sort order is typically by recency or by a relevance algorithm the platform does not explain. The default sort is not where the ritual begins.
The ritual begins when the viewer changes the sort order. Most commonly this is a sort by Lowest Rated, which produces a collection of reviews that are disproportionate in intensity, specific in their grievances, and more detailed than the positive reviews in ways that are frequently not flattering to the product. The field researcher should understand that people who are satisfied rarely describe their satisfaction at length. People who are not satisfied have things to say.
Three Field Observations
First observation: a sort by Lowest Rated produces the most information per review but also the least representative sample. The field researcher will read about a zipper that failed after six weeks, a color that did not match the website image in a way the reviewer considered misleading, and a customer service interaction that went wrong in a direction no one anticipated. None of these experiences are typical. All of them are possible.
Second observation: after reading the lowest-rated reviews, the field researcher is in possession of the product's failure modes. This is useful and also slightly exhausting. They now know what can go wrong and will be aware of this possibility when the product arrives. They were not aware of it before. It is not clear whether this awareness improves the experience.
Third observation: the field researcher who sorts by highest-rated after reading the lowest-rated reviews encounters an entirely different product. The product is uniformly beloved. It transformed someone's mornings. It arrives quickly and is exactly as described. These things are also true, for different customers. The field researcher is now holding two contradictory product experiences and must synthesize a purchasing decision.
The Governing Rule
Sort order determines which version of the product the field researcher encounters. The product has not changed. The sort order has. This means the product exists, from the field researcher's perspective, as a variable, and the variable is set by a dropdown menu.
A Note on Sympathy
The field researcher who has spent thirty minutes sorting and reading reviews for a product that costs nineteen dollars should be met with sympathy rather than impatience. Something about the ritual is useful. The field researcher is not yet sure what it is. They will purchase the product and sort the reviews on the next one.
This guide does not recommend a preferred sort order. Both are instructive. Neither is sufficient.