Culture and social influence: Evidence from online reviews

Research based on surveys and lab experiments indicates that people in more individualistic cultures are less likely to conform to the opinions of others. However, it remains unclear how well these findings generalize to real-world settings. This paper examines how culture shapes social influence in the context of online consumer reviews. By leveraging discontinuities in Tripadvisor’s display of average ratings, I estimate how reviewers from different countries respond to the average opinion of prior consumers. When a restaurant’s displayed average rating increases by 0.5 stars, reviewers from less individualistic cultures give ratings about 0.1 stars higher. This conformity effect declines with individualism and disappears entirely among reviewers from the most individualistic cultures. The pattern is not explained by differences in observable reviewer characteristics or by country-level socioeconomic factors correlated with individualism, such as income or religion. These findings highlight that cultural values shape user behavior on online review platforms and may ultimately affect the accuracy of the information these systems aggregate.