When votes are shown before someone votes, there seems to be crowd mentality that results in the post with the most votes (usually the first answer) getting disproportionally more votes - even when there are (arguably) better posts that just happen to have been posted later.
Some applications only show customers the results after they have voted, which seems to lead to less biased results.
Should we show the current votes before or after voting?
Answer
A lot depends on the purpose of the voting, but the general rules that I would follow are:
Show the votes before voting:
- the primary purpose of the voting is the sorting the posts / options
- you are allowed to vote on more than one post / option
- there are potentially many posts / options and you don’t need someone to have read them all before they vote
StackExchange is a good example of this, where the UX is more important than the level of crowd bias in the answer.
Show the votes only after voting:
- it’s critical that the voting is unbiased
- you typically only have one vote
- there are few posts / options to choose between.
This is typically the case with surveys and elections. Apps like Polar also do this. 
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