scholarly journals “They don’t know better than I do”: People are reluctant to rely on the wisdom of crowds in individual decision making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merav Yonah ◽  
Yoav Kessler
Keyword(s):  
Personal Information ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
Decision Bias ◽  
Decision Outcomes ◽  
Dot Motion ◽  
Better Than ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

Establishing the way people decide to use or avoid information when making a decision is of great theoretical and applied interest. In particular, the “big data revolution” enable decision makers to harness the wisdom of crowds (WoC) toward reaching better decisions. The WoC is a well-documented phenomenon that highlights the potential superiority of collective wisdom over that of an individual. However, individuals may fail to acknowledge the power of collective wisdom as a means for optimizing decision outcomes. Using a random dot motion task, the present study examined situations in which decision makers must choose between relying on their own personal information or relying on the WoC in their decision. Although the latter was always the rational choice, a substantial part of the participants chose to rely on their own observation and also advised others to do so. This choice tendency was associated with higher confidence, but not with better task performance, and hence reflects overconfidence. Acknowledging and understanding this decision bias may help mitigating it in applied settings.

The Paradox of Interaction: Communication Network Centralization, Shared Task Experience, and the Wisdom of Crowds in Online Crowdsourcing Communities

2020 ◽  
pp. 009365022091503
Author(s):  
Bei Yan ◽  
Lian Jian ◽  
Ruqin Ren ◽  
Janet Fulk ◽  
Emily Sidnam-Mauch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Communication Network ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Collective Learning ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Shared Task ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
Task Experience ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

Research on the wisdom of crowds (WOC) identifies two paradoxical effects of communication. The social influence effect hampers the WOC, whereas the collective learning effect improves crowd wisdom. Yet it remains unclear under what conditions such communication impedes or enhances collective wisdom. The current study examined two features characterizing communication in online communities, communication network centralization and shared task experience, and their effect on the WOC. Both these features can serve as indicators of the likelihood that underlying communication may facilitate either social influence or collective learning. With an 8-year longitudinal behavioral-trace data set of 269,871 participants and 1,971 crowds, we showed that communication network centralization negatively affected the WOC. By contrast, shared task experience positively predicted the WOC. Shared task experience also moderated the effect of communication network centralization such that centralized communication networks became more beneficial for crowd performance as shared task experience increased.

scholarly journals EPISTEMIC DEMOCRACY WITH DEFENSIBLE PREMISES

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Dietrich ◽  
Kai Spiekermann
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Epistemic Democracy ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Condorcet Jury Theorem ◽  
Jury Theorem ◽  
Misleading Conclusion ◽  
Better Than ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises – voter independence – is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, ‘large crowds are fallible but better than small groups’. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (‘indistinguishable’) voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We also prove a more general and simpler such jury theorem.

scholarly journals Prediction Diversity and Selective Attention in the Wisdom of Crowds

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 861-875
Author(s):  
Davi A. Nobre ◽  
◽  
José F. Fontanari ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Selective Attention ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Paper Strip ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Individual Estimate ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Average Individual ◽  
Better Than ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

The wisdom of crowds is the idea that the combination of independent estimates of the magnitude of some quantity yields a remarkably accurate prediction, which is always more accurate than the average individual estimate. In addition, it is largely believed that the accuracy of the crowd can be improved by increasing the diversity of the estimates. Here we report the results of three experiments to probe the current understanding of the wisdom of crowds, namely, the estimates of the number of candies in a jar, the length of a paper strip and the number of pages of a book. We find that the collective estimate is better than the majority of the individual estimates in all three experiments. In disagreement with the prediction diversity theorem, we find no significant correlation between the prediction diversity and the collective error. The poor accuracy of the crowd on some experiments leads us to conjecture that its alleged accuracy is most likely an artifact of selective attention.

Applying Formal Social Epistemology to the Real World

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Martini
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social ◽  
Better Than ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

AbstractThe claim that diversity and independence have a net positive epistemic effect on the judgments of groups has been recently defended formally by Scott Page, among others, and popularized in Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. In Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds Thorn and Schurz take issue with the claim that more diversity and independence in groups leads to better collective judgments. I argue that Thorn and Schurz's arguments are helpful in clarifying a number of over-generalizations about diversity and independence that are often circulated in the social epistemology literature. I also argue that the relevant formal arguments are easily misunderstood when presented 'in a vacuum', that is, without a context of application in mind. I provide a different approach to understanding formal results in social epistemology: With the help of concrete scenarios and the formal literature, I focus on a trade-off between independence and dependence in groups. I show that the approach works well also for another principle in social epistemology; namely, the principle that 'more heads are better than few'.

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