Abstract Given the importance of online reviews, as evidenced by extant research, we studied an understudied area of the impact of past reviews on sentiments of future reviews. Past studies in the emergent area of incidence of reviews have investigated the generation of ratings but there seems to be a lacuna in the second dimension of the reviews (i.e., the textual sentiments). Through a controlled experiment (N = 232), we analyzed the impact of past reviews on reviewers’ subsequent texts by using the unique lens of social appraisal theory. We found the influence of the selection of reviews on most e-commerce websites could strongly bias subsequent written review sentiments, and this effect is more pronounced when the reviewer experienced higher disconfirmation. We also observed review writers tend to post extreme reviews in the absence of any benchmark or prior reviews. The study results extend the understanding of users’ reviews under social influence and enhance the appraisal theoretic understanding of review generation.

中文翻译：

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社会对未来评论情绪的影响：评估理论观点

摘要 鉴于现有研究证明在线评论的重要性，我们研究了过去评论对未来评论情绪影响的研究不足的领域。过去在评论发生率新兴领域的研究已经调查了评分的产生，但评论的第二个维度（即文本情感）似乎存在缺陷。通过受控实验（N = 232），我们利用社会评价理论的独特视角分析了过去的评论对评论者后续文本的影响。我们发现，大多数电子商务网站上的评论选择的影响可能会强烈偏向后续的书面评论情绪，当评论者经历更高的不肯定时，这种影响更加明显。我们还观察到评论作者倾向于在没有任何基准或先前评论的情况下发表极端评论。研究结果扩展了对社会影响下用户评论的理解，增强了对评论生成的评价理论理解。