Consumers often can't detect fake reviews – and underestimate how many negative reviews might be fakes

Consumers who have a personality that scores high in terms of openness – such as being open to new adventures and intellectually curious – have better success at spotting fake reviews than other personality types, according to our recently published research. To reach these conclusions, we compiled reviews from a unique data set of 1,600 Chicago hotel reviews, marked as either fake or real, that was compiled by artificial intelligence engineer and researcher Myle Ott and his team for peer-reviewed research they published in 2011 and 2013. Each participant was assigned a hotel, read eight reviews about it, guessed at which ones were fake and explained why they seemed fake or real.