The Wisdom Of Crowds

The Wisdom Of Crowds researches why groups reach better decisions than individuals, what makes groups smart, where the dangers of group decisions lie, and how each of us can encourage the groups we are part of to work together.

When Francis Galton visited a livestock fair in 1906, he surely wasn’t expecting this. Over 800 contestants entered a contest where they had to guess the weight of an ox.

Being a true scientist, Galton took a close look at the statistical data (hard work by the way, without Excel), and found no one guessed the true weight of the ox (1,198 lbs), correctly.

The closest guess was 1,207 lbs, still 9 pounds off.

However, when he calculated the average weight guess of all participants, he was shocked: 1,197 lbs. The crowd as a whole was just 1 lb off.

This phenomenon persists, even though weight guessing contests have gone a bit out of fashion.

A modern example would be Wikipedia. While no single person could have provided all the information for Mr. Galt’s Wikipedia article, the combined power of Wikipedia’s open contributor model helped create a sound report on the man.

Sometimes groups reach wrong decisions, despite being big and diverse. One of the reasons can be herd behavior. Humans are social beings, and thus we naturally feel safer if we go with the common opinion of the crowd. It lets us hide inside the crowd and protects us from potentially looking like a fool or even being expelled from the group. Remember when you told your parents that you “have to stay till 12 am at Jake’s party, because everyone else gets to stay that late?“. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Note: The cool thing about this particular example was that it worked if everyone told this to their parents, none of whom had originally agreed to staying out that late 😀 There are 2 factors that strengthen this natural tendency of ours: Social proof Social rank Social proof is what most websites nowadays use to make you buy their stuff. It can come in the form of “X number of customers”, “join 40,000 subscribers”, or the number of people who backed a Kickstarter project for 3D printed soles. If we know members of a group have used a certain service, or trust a person, it’s easier for us to trust the same brand or individual. However, this goes wrong when we accept social proof and use it as a replacement for doing our own thinking. In a similar fashion, hierarchy can have a big influence on whether we follow the herd. This happens all the time in politics, where only a few are allowed to speak, but…