The Marmite Effect: Why It's Good to Have Haters

If something has a rating of 5/10, you would be inclined to say it's somewhat underwhelming and perhaps not entirely liked. This assumes that the scores are normally distributed. If they are instead distributed according to the inverse – a marmite distribution where people love it or hate it and scores cluster around 1 and 10 – there will be a much greater absolute number of people who love it. The average score could be lower for the marmite and it would still have a greater number of devotees. Being controversial actually makes something more liked than being bland.