Is there any research on numbered vs. star voting systems?

Question

Has anyone done any research on user acceptance of the following voting systems for different target audiences?

Or

I'm not interested which is more accurate or how the votes will be used for ranking. What I'm interested is from a user perspective, which is more intuitive - based on the demographic of that user.

Obviously, as developers, we all understand the StackOverflow style voting system, but I'm curious as to whether this only makes sense because of the way we [as developers] think. Does the Amazon style star system make more sense to the voter on sites targetted a more basic users?

Has anyone done any research on this and if so what was the outcome? Does anyone have any links to research results?

Answer 1

Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone is a great book I read recently. He's explored virtually every voting system that's been tried and analyzed them. Everything from political elections to web site voting systems is covered. (hotornot is discussed at length). I highly recommend it.

Answer 2

The two "voting systems" you mentioned seem to me to serve two different purposes: voting and rating. Voting up a question means something different than rating a product 5 stars. Voting up/down seems to make more sense on a site like SO or Digg, whereas rating something with stars is probably better applied to a product or a song.

Having said that, I would think stars are more readily understood by more people.

Answer 3

I want to point out that if you have dealt enough with the iPhone app store, you will notice that a lot of users vote opposite (1 star instead of 5 stars) of convention with a clearly glowing review. At first I thought this was an abnormal occurrence but I've seen it hundreds of times now.

So the "up tick" vs "down tick" style makes a lot of sense in light of that trend.