The individual-bias hypothesis. Alternately, one could hypothesize that when a user considers a review, he or she will rate it more highly if it expresses an opinion that he or she agrees with.3 Note the contrasts and similarities with the previous hypothesis: rather than evaluating whether a review is close to the mean opinion, a user evaluates whether it is close to their own opinion. At the same time, one might expect that if a diverse range of individuals apply this rule, then the overall helpfulness evaluation could be hard to distinguish from one based on conformity; this issue turns out to be crucial, and we explore it further below