Neuro News Nanos
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
Here are this morning’s:
* Employees paid by the hour happier — hourly wage-earners focus more attention on their pay than those who earn a salary — concrete, consistent focus on the worth of the employee’s time in each paycheck influences the level of happiness the employee feels
* New diagnostic manual pushed back a year — “Extending the timeline will allow more time for public review, field trials and revisions” — more like: “owing to the recent sh–storm over our behind-closed-doors policy and strident criticism from past committee members about the scientific quality of our review process, we’ve decided we need a bit of breathing space”
* Personalities judged accurately by photos alone — self-esteem, ratings of extraversion and religiosity were correctly judged from physical appearance — good news for people who judge books by their covers
* Mystery shoppers for mental hospitals — three “mystery shopper” psychiatric nurses were admitted onto the psychiatric ward pretending to be patients in an attempt to evaluate the care — none were suspected as faking
* Does advertising bias wine product reviews? — short answer: not much — in other words: yes
Follow Neuroworld on Twitter: @ryansager
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
Re: Wine Spectator and biased wine ratings.
Wine Spectator’s advertisers frequently complain their ratings are too low, while most highly-rated wineries are too small to have advertisig budgets. It’s a no-win world!
The paper cited here “proves” that Wine Spectator ratings are biased based on an assumption that Wine Advocate scores (a competitive critic, used as a proxy for quality) are not biased. But that assumption is not proved, or even tested. In addition, the paper finds that Wine Spectator ratings for advertisers are lower than for non-advertisers, and that advertisers receive higher scores from Wine Advocate than Wine Spectator. Finally, the difference is calculated at 0.42 points on the 100-point scale. While we believe this scale can accurately reflect informed judgments about wine quality, not even Wine Spectator would calculate them to the hundredth of a point.
All Wine Spectator reviews are based on blind tastings. No bias is possible, nor would it be tolerated, as our loyalty is always to our readers. That’s why Wine Spectator is the most widely-read wine publication in the world. Join us at WineSpectator.com
Thomas Matthews
Executive editor
Wine Spectator