Should you read a holiday review by someone from a highly masculine culture?

Oct 15

You’ve just got back from an expensive holiday. The room was too small. The shower didn’t work. You got a bout of ‘tummy trouble’ on the second day you arrived which didn’t clear up until the day before you left. You are now back home and hunched over your computer, seething and eager to post a review of the holiday. You are looking forward to enjoying a bout of revenge, when you suddenly feel a twinge: if people are influenced by your review then nobody will go to that hotel, which means the very nice old cleaner will lose her job, that nice young waiter won’t be able to pay his college fees, and that region of the world will experience a slump in their economy, causing misery to millions. All because of review revenge. Ok, that version of the impact of your review might be over the top, but if you have ever reviewed a holiday online you might have experienced a bout of cognitive dissonance over the need to be honest versus the need not to hurt the feelings or the livelihood of the employees at the place you stayed.

So before you write your holiday review, here’s a question for you: what type of reviews do people find most useful? A review that bluntly tells it like it is, or a review that is more understanding of the many reasons that problems occur on holidays?

Last year, researchers from universities in England and France set out to identify the factors that made a review useful to readers. To do this they took a sample of 570,669 online reviews of 851 hotels published by reviewers from 81 different countries.

“By this definition, masculinity is highest in Japan (95 out of 100), moderately high in the UK, Ireland and Germany (mid-to-high 60s), slightly lower in the US and Australia (61 and 61 respectively), and lowest in the Nordic countries”.

They were particularly interested in how much different the culture of the reviewer made to how useful their review was perceived as being. To assess the impact of culture, they used Hofstede's cultural values framework to identify factors such as individualism, being cautious about purchases, and masculinity.

Before we look at the findings, let’s unpack their definition of masculinity and femininity, because we know that people define these in a wide variety of ways. Hofstede's framework defined masculinity as “the degree to which heroism, achievement, assertiveness and material rewards are appreciated in a society”. Masculine cultures emphasize work, competition and material accomplishments, whereas feminine societies put co-operation, caring for others and quality of life at the forefront. By this definition, masculinity is highest in Japan (95 out of 100), moderately high in the UK, Ireland and Germany (mid-to-high 60s), slightly lower in the US and Australia (61 and 61 respectively), and lowest in the Nordic countries, with Denmark, Holland, Norway and Sweden all scoring below 20. Hofstede's definitions, and the ratings of counties, might be unfamilar to psychologists, but they are commonly used in cross-cultural studies of consumer behaviour.

Before they ran the study, the researchers predicted that reviews from holidaymakers from more masculine cultures would be less helpful to the readers of reviews. Their reasoning was that people from more masculine cultures would be “less prone to cooperate and be less helpful to other consumers... more assertive and are more likely to voice their pleasure or displeasure about new products… express their opinions in a more aggressive way, and intense emotions like angriness may prevail in reviews”.

So what did the researchers find? After running a multiple regression analysis, they found that – to their surprise - reviewers from cultures that score higher on masculinity were rated as writing more helpful reviews.

In order of statistical significance, the strongest predictors of giving a helpful review were: being from a culture scoring high on power distance (the extent to which individual actors accept that power is distributed inequitably), individualism (the degree to which people in a society behave autonomously rather than integrated into groups), masculinity (heroism, achievement, assertiveness and material rewards), uncertainty avoidance (being cautious about purchases) and indulgence (belief in freedom of speech and other freedoms). The sex of the reviewer made no significant difference to the helpfulness of the review. The researchers also controlled for the influence of other variables such as the type of holiday (duration, distance, class of hotel etc) and the gender of the reviewer.

“masculine societies tend to be less tolerant towards service failure [thus] more likely to voice their disappointment”

So how did the researchers explain their findings regarding masculinity? The said: “masculine societies tend to be less tolerant towards service failure [thus] more likely to voice their disappointment than individuals from feminine societies that instead tend to express a preference for cooperation and a caring attitude for the weak”.

A criticism of this study could be that the definition of masculinity used will raise the eyebrows of those who are unfamiliar with Hofstede's definition of masculinity (heroism, achievement, assertiveness and material rewards). To be fair though, although it lacks some aspects that might be have been included (e.g. mastery and control of emotions), is not very different to most definitions of masculinity, and is probably more representative of how masculinity is viewed by most people in most of the world, especially compared to some of the negative definitions that have come from Western social science departments in the past 30 or so years.

Another criticism is that the analysis is correlational, so we can’t be sure that the culture of the reviewer is the factor that caused how well the review was rated. Although the researchers controlled for several variables, they did not control for potentially important variables related to the review, such as their age, educational level or any of their personality factors. If we take the study at face value, the advice is that if you want to read a helpful holiday review, you should try one written by someone from Japan rather than someone from Sweden.

This study, being a ‘big data’ analysis, had advantages of access to a lot of data, and would have been relatively easy to conduct. However a future study would benefit a lot from measuring the masculinity of the individual people writing the reviews as well as the masculinity of the culture they came from, though this would be a big step in terms of the research design, adding steps that would make it a much less easy study to conduct.

So what conclusions can we draw from this research? Well, because the sex of the reviewer made no significant difference to the helpfulness of the review, the cultural expression of masculinity might be more important than the sex of the person expressing it. For fans of the nature/nurture debate around masculinity, this finding would be a point in favour of those who emphasise the cultural component in masculinity over the biological component. (Spoiler alert: masculinity is accepted by many as being a combination of nature and nurture). On the other hand, as noted above, we don’t know the masculinity score of the person writing the review, so we don’t know how different the results might have been if the researchers were able to correlate that – rather than the masculinity of their culture - with the ratings of their reviews.

All too often masculinity is portrayed negatively in Western countries these days, and even the researchers in the present study presumed that masculinity would be associated with angry and unhelpful reviews. So it’s nice to read something positive about masculinity for a change, even if it’s only about holiday reviews.

This article is based on the study by Raffaele Filieri and Marcello Mariani (2021)

The role of cultural values in consumers' evaluation of online review helpfulness: a big data approach in the journal International Marketing Review, Vol. 38 No. 6, pp. 1267-1288. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMR-07-2020-0172

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