What Is Self-Selection Bias?

The self-selection bias is a psychological term, defined as individuals selecting themselves into a group, therefore causing a biased sample. People can generally see this trend with books, in the sense that an author’s initial reviewers tend to be people who know or know of the author: Family, friends, or even avid fans of the author’s past books. Researchers Xin Xin Li and Lorin M. Hitt researched this information in their analysis of book reviews. As they detected, the higher the correlation coefficient of a book’s reviews, the more likely reviews follow a declining trend over time. Moreover, there is a time period in which the reviews undershoot a long-run average before it finally recovers. Thus, because individuals with higher relations

This mechanism refers to the fact that the likelihood of a book’s ratings to become more negative is greater for books that actually win awards. One reason for this finding is that readers that rate a book after it has received an award will have tastes that are less likely to rate the book favorably. For example, people may presume that their tastes are more widespread than they actually are, such that they incorrectly believe that the kinds of books they like are similar to the kinds of books that elite judges might choose for an award, or at the very least that their tastes are not wildly dissimilar from those of elites (Kovács, Sharkey, pg 6). Furthermore, Prizewinning books generate a greater increase in popularity than those that are short-listed. This is due to the fact that the number of reviews of prizewinning books increases dramatically. On the other hand, Kovács and Sharkey did not find as dramatic of a trend behind short-listed books. They found that while both the prizewinning and short-listed books had a similar number of reviews before the announcement was awarded, the prizewinning books had a greater increase in negative reviews. As discussed in their research, people perceive products as valuable not just for their functional characteristics but also as signals of social identity (2014, pg 8). An example of this is the “overshooting” problem. Similar to how parents may pick a presently unpopular name for their unborn child, they may later find out that they have inadvertently actually given their child a very popular name, because others separately made the same decision. So, the extent to which such unexpected popularity is undesirable accounts for the quality of ratings to suffer. Some individuals generally do not want to be grouped with a population, and thus have a negative bias toward things deemed “popular.” Kovács and Sharkey’s research has