What makes an online review impolite? And how do we emotionally respond to online (im)politeness? In this postdoc project, we investigate people’s reactions to different degrees of (im)politeness in reviews and complaints on the Internet. Using corpus-based stimuli from French native speakers, we are designing ecological experiments in which we will collect both subjective judgments about (im)politeness and objective, physiological responses to online reviews. We will also explore several types of information that are available in reviews and are therefore likely to shape (im)politeness perceptions: customer gender inferable from the customer’s first name and the number of reviews posted, as well as cultural differences (for example Belgian vs. French).
This research is a follow-up on joint work with Sofie Decock (MULTIPLES) and Ilse Depraetere (Université de Lille, STL) devoted to Twitter complaints.