One of the main concerns for online shopping websites is to provide efficient and customized recommendations to a very large number of users based on their preferences. Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most famous type of recommender system method to provide personalized recommendations to users. CF generates recommendations by identifying clusters of similar users or items from the user-item rating matrix. This cluster of similar users or items is generally identified by using some similarity measurement method. Among numerous proposed similarity measure methods by researchers, the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is a commonly used similarity measure method for CF-based recommender systems. The standard PCC suffers some inherent limitations and ignores user rating preference behavior (RPB). Typically, users have different RPB, where some users may give the same rating to various items without liking the items and some users may tend to give average rating albeit liking the items. Traditional similarity measure methods (including PCC) do not consider this rating pattern of users. In this article, we present a novel similarity measure method to consider user RPB while calculating similarity among users. The proposed similarity measure method state user RPB as a function of user average rating value, and variance or standard deviation. The user RPB is then combined with an improved model of standard PCC to form an improved similarity measure method for CF-based recommender systems. The proposed similarity measure is named as improved PCC weighted with RPB (IPWR). The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the IPWR similarity measure method is performed using five state-of-the-art datasets (i.e. Epinions, MovieLens-100K, MovieLens-1M, CiaoDVD, and MovieTweetings). The IPWR similarity measure method performs better than state-of-the-art similarity measure methods in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), precision, recall, and F-measure.