Is it safe to trust a perfect five-star rating?
Perfection is sometimes a signal and sometimes a question.
Five stars should mean perfect.
That sounds reasonable.
But perfection is surprisingly complicated.
The hidden mechanism is selection bias. People with strong positive experiences are more likely to leave reviews, especially when a business is new.
A perfect score from twenty people tells a different story than a 4.7 score from ten thousand.
People often trust ratings because numbers feel objective.
The wisest travelers treat ratings as clues rather than verdicts.
