Impact of Perspective Taking on Reviewer Behavior: A Multi-Method Exploration

While the existing literature on antecedents of review helpfulness has primarily focused on the direct impact of a variety of individual factors and offered an increasingly long list of recommendations for reviewers and review platforms, few studies have taken a more holistic view or examined how reviewer behaviors can be shaped by the writing guidelines. In this paper, we explore how taking the perspective of prospective consumers, a holistic recommendation that can be easily integrated into writing guidelines, can systematically shape the way reviewers write reviews and subsequently affect the perceived value of their produced content. Extending the concepts of intuition and lay theories, we predict that perspective taking is positively associated with perceived review helpfulness, and that this association can be explained through information amount and information objectivity. Two studies with distinct methodologies provided consistent evidence for our predictions. Our findings provide important implications for both theory and practice.