The influence of user personality and rating scale features on rating behaviour: an empirical study

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how rating scale features and user personality traits jointly influence rating behavior, revealing that scale design and personality interact to affect user ratings in web systems.

Contribution

It explores the combined effects of rating scale features and user personality traits on rating behavior, highlighting the importance of considering personality in interface design.

Findings

Color and granularity influence user ratings.

Effects vary with personality traits like agreeableness and openness.

Personality traits modulate the impact of scale features.

Abstract

User ratings are widely used in web systems and applications to provide personalized interaction and to help other users make better choices. Previous research has shown that rating scale features and user personality can both influence users' rating behaviour, but relatively little work has been devoted to understanding if the effects of rating scale features may vary depending on users' personality. In this paper, we study the impact of scale granularity and colour on the ratings of individuals with different personalities, represented according to the Big Five model. To this aim, we carried out a user study with 203 participants, in the context of a web-based survey where users were assigned an image rating task. Our results confirm that both colour and granularity can affect user ratings, but their specific effects also depend on user scores for certain personality traits, in particular agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness.