The Influential Mind Made Me Think #14: On Crowd Wisdom

The famous wisdom of the crowds can be traced back to Francis Glaton's paper published in the prestigious journal "Nature". During the 1907 Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, a competition was held. People had to guess the weight of a chubby ox. Eight hundred people participated. When the results were analyzed, the median weight turned out to be 1,207 pounds - number which was only one percent off from the ox's actual weight! Galton went on to publish his findings, concluding that the wisdom of the crowds is greater than original thought. A little more than a century later, we still believe that the more brains contributing to a decision, the better the resulting decision will be.

Pixabay image source.

The group can be wise, but it can often be foolish. (Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind)

The idea that the crowd is wise has been further reinforced by James Surowiecki's 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Nevertheless, if you read the book carefully, he cautions his readers that the group is wiser than the individual only under very specific conditions. One of this conditions, on which I expand later, is having independent variables. Even with his warning, "two brains are better than one", remains a general rule of thumb or belief. The truth is not that simple.

Let's go back to the ox example for a second. Any estimate a person gave, was imprecise. What is most important is that those estimates will naturally distribute around the real weight of the ox. As Sharot would say, "they bracket the truth". When such a natural distribution happens, the miscalculation errors on each side will cancel each other out. Therefore, the average guess of a group of people will be close to the true number. There is no magic or intrinsic wisdom in this. It's pure mathematics. What is important though, is questioning yourself what are the conditions that make this approach hold? The first and most important condition is independence.

In the last editions of "The Influential Mind Made Me Think" I have been discussing how hard it is to have an independent opinion of something. There are so many things around us that shape our decision making that I believe a true independent decision or choice is impossible to make. Anyone's decision making is further impaired/influenced if before sharing his/her decision, he/she is made aware of the decisions of others. Furthermore, research suggests that in the face of apparent consensus, only about thirty percent of individuals will voice a different view. Taking this information into account, what can we do to make participants submit independent decisions? Even though influence also occurs under the radar, it is important that participants submit their opinions before debating with colleagues. That way, we can stay as true to independence as we can. On the other hand, if you are a manager, for example, looking for constant "crowd wisdom" in your team, you need to ask yourself a deeper question. To what degree are the beliefs of the people from your team independent? This is specially important to consider if the crowd is in recurring interactions with one another.

If independence is not achieved, tallying many opinions will not necessarily make you wiser. It will, however, still make you more confident. Be careful! So, for example, if you are looking to hire a candidate and three of your colleagues are interviewing him/her, have them submit their evaluations before they share any opinions or debate about the candidates. Therefore you will avoid an agreement that is product of social influences. Our self-assurance is intensified whenever we make an interdependent decision. Nevertheless, this confidence can be completely misplaced. In conclusion, if you ever want to use "crowd wisdom" make sure to make the inputs as independent as possible. If you fail at doing so, you might end up with an erroneous conclusion but with huge confidence in it. In other words, if your inputs are not independent, you might end up looking like a fool.

What do you think? I'd like to hear your opinions.

In the past, I was sharing all the links to the posts of this series. Now that the series has a decent amount of posts, I will only share the ones that I think are most correlated with the current post. So, if you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, and are related to this post, click on these past posts:

Best,

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