'Specially For You' - Examining the Barnum Effect's Influence on the Perceived Quality of System Recommendations

The ‘Barnum effect’ is a psychological phenomenon under which people assign higher quality ratings to personality descriptions developed ‘specially for you’ than the same descriptions described as ‘generally true of people.’ This effect suggests that recommender interfaces could elevate the perceived quality of recommendations simply by indicating that they are explicitly personalised. We therefore conducted a crowd-sourced experiment (n=492) that examined the perceived quality of personalised versus non-personalised movie recommendations for good and bad movies – importantly, the actual recommendations were identical, and were merely presented as being either personalised or not. Contrary to the Barnum effect, results showed numerically lower mean quality scores for personalised recommendations, but with no significant difference. Our findings suggest that Barnum-like effects of personalisation have at most a small influence on perceived quality, and that designers should not rely on this effect to improve user experience (despite online design guidance suggesting the opposite).