Going Solo? Your Online Reviews Are More Trusted

THE MOST TRUSTED REVIEWERS of a leisure experience—like a visit to an art gallery, museum, movie theater or zoo—are people who go it alone.

“People think that someone who does stuff alone must really be interested in or knowledgeable about that activity,” says Rebecca Ratner, Dean’s Professor of Marketing, who published a paper on the finding in the Journal of Marketing Research. But if they went with a friend, she found, it could be just because they wanted to do something outside on a nice day.

Ratner for the past decade has studied people’s reluctance to do activities alone, finding that they often enjoy themselves more than they expected. For this latest research, she and co-author Yuechen Wu Ph.D. ’19, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State, examined reviews from Tripadvisor that revealed if consumers were alone or with others.

Other Tripadvisor users gave more “likes” by clicking a thumbs-up button to reviews and recommendations from people who did something alone—results the researchers validated through lab experiments.

Ratner hopes more people take a cue from other solo consumers that they can get out there sans companion: “Don’t let it stop you if you don’t happen to have a friend or a partner or a child to go with you that day. Live your life and do the things that you think would be fun.”