Yelp Reviews Are Like Psychological Selfies

Online restaurant reviews have weaved their way into the modern dining experience, so much so that when you’re trying to find a place to eat nowadays, you can’t avoid being swayed by the rows of yellow stars, excitable exclamation marks, or angry all caps of aspiring foodies. Everyone’s a critic. And those few words frantically typed after dessert is served have gained a significance way above most comments in cyberspace: their impact on real-world business has led to court cases over alleged defamatory comments, and a black market for complimentary reviews.

But as well as revealing information about the establishment under critique, Yelp reviews can tell you a lot about the writer. It’s like a psychological selfie—in the form of unimaginative adjectives and misspelled menu items. In a new paper in the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday, linguistics researchers from Stanford University looked at the language in Yelp reviews to see what it revealed about diners and noted some interesting trends. First up: We’re all preoccupied with sex and drugs.

They used a computer model to analyse 900,000 US reviews and pick out characteristics like the number of words, the types of pronouns used, and words from certain lexicons. Among the positive reviews, they noticed that expensive food tends to be compared to sex, and cheap food to drugs. That might seem the wrong way round given the respective costs of those two activities, but it seems to be more of a class thing.

In reviews of very expensive restaurants, diners would describe their food using words like “sensual,” “orgasmic,” and “voluptuous;” it was “temptation” or “food porn” (“wine porn” is apparently a thing now, too).

They also used longer words and sentences, which the authors wrote suggested they were trying to portray themselves as educated, and of higher socioeconomic class. The kind of sexual metaphors used are also often used in advertising to this demographic (think of Marks and Spencer’s sultry voiceovers). That’s not to say the reviewers themselves were necessarily that articulate. One example given in the paper was, “the apple tarty ice cream pastry caramely thing was just orgasmic.”

On the other hand, positive reviews of cheap restaurants tended toward the drug lexicon. “The cheaper the restaurant, the more use of the language of drugs and addiction,” wrote the authors. These meals were less food porn, more “food crack.”

The crack-like foods were generally unhealthy snacks like pizza and burgers (the kind of fare you’d expect to get in cheaper eateries), with the exception of sushi. It was obviously beyond the realms of this study to consider whether fast foods might actually be addicting, but it’s clear there’s a widespread belief that it might be, and the drugs reference acknowledges a kind of guilty pleasure. As the authors put it, “Craved foods aren’t vegetables.”

Another observation the researchers made focused on the negative reviews—those rare one-star write-ups. Here, they found people didn’t really talk about the food but more about themselves, using lots of first-person pronouns and employing language suggesting they were actually traumatised by their dining experience.

They literally used the same kind of words people employ after going through trauma, and their reviews came across as a way of coping with their suffering via digital foodie tears. These poor people had to wait for their entrées, and sometimes couldn’t get a table because they hadn’t reserved—the horror! “We were both so furious we refused to finish the food on principle,” one reviewer was quoted. Needless to say they’re probably the kind of people you never want to invite for dinner.

In sum, the study gives a few interesting insights into our relationships with food, but it also shows quite how revelatory what we write online can be. “When you write a review on the web you're providing a window into your own psyche,” said co-author Dan Jurafsky.

You might as well still have a LiveJournal.