This is a lesson in creating valid scientific instruments that actually measure something, rather than providing pretty numbers that purport to measure something. Infoworld is one of a number of weekly IT magazines that is distributed freely to IT professionals working in the IT world. …
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What’s this got to do with psychology? People look for rating systems to simplify sometimes complex issues into more manageable information chunks. (Humans tend to engage in information chunking behavior; think of how you remember a phone number for instance.) Those chunks, however, need to retain some actual meaning, or else they lose their information providing usefulness.
Psychology is concerned not only with human behavior, but how human behavior is shaped by things such as technology. Technology, in turn, is shaped to help humans better deal with the increasing amount of information overload. A rating scale simplifies information so we know that a 10 is “hot” and a “1″ is not. But if everyone is a 9 or 10, then you might as well throw out the scale, because it has lost its information-providing benefit.