I recently conducted a user study as part of my research in computer science. Respondents were asked to rate articles from the web on a five-point Likert scale from Very Poor to Very Good.Only 15 percent of ratings were on the negative side. My first conclusion was that most articles must be good. But then I discovered that there was considerably less agreement between users (each article was rated by a couple users) within negatively rated articles than within positively rated ones. So it seems to be harder for the users to accurately rate a bad article.Is there a psychological effect that could (in part) explain this? References to papers are appreciated. Note that I don't mean bias issues regarding the Likert scale; it is carefully designed.I'm a layman in psychology, but I was thinking that maybe there was a subconcious fear of rating too low so user rated too high... or something like that.
Psychological effects on quality assessments
social psychology;measurement