Why do we measure things out of five? Like, 5 star hotels or restaurants? Why is it five and not, say, 37?
In: 0
It’s not always. Sometimes we rate things out of ten.
What we want from a rating is enough degrees to be able to distinguish things, but not so many that it’s hard to understand.
You want the worst things at one end, the best things at the other, and then a little middle ground for the average.
Let’s say we have the worst food, the middle food, and the best food. That’s at least three degrees needed. Now if we want to add in “above average but not the best” and “below average but not the worst” then we have 5 ratings levels (or “stars”).
We can add more degrees but that will inevitably make it harder for people to understand at face value the nuance between the tiers. The simpler it is, the more intuitive for someone glancing at a score, but the less accurately it might reflect the opinion of the rater.
We also tend to pick numbers which are intuitive to us, and us humans using base 10 tend to like things in 5’s and 10’s rather than 6’s and 12’s.
Latest Answers