So, if you get something for recommending a product on Amazon the recommendation is more likely to be biased…
This is pretty unsurprising given the psychology of reciprocity. If someone gives you something you get a reciprocal sense of obligation to return the favor. This is a built in human bias, and not something that we are necessarily even conscious of doing.
The big problem Amazon has in stamping out this sort of paid review system is that Amazon does it itself, through its Vine program which provides free, advance copies of books to top reviewers. So, it can’t very well prohibit other companies from providing freebies in exchange for “honest reviews”.
I’d say that Amazon needs to dump it’s Vine program and ban all incentivized reviews.
