The "wisdom of the crowd" has become a bit of a pop cliché, but it's backed up by real-world evidence. When groups of people are asked to provide estimates of obscure information, the median value of their answers will often be remarkably close to the right one, even though many of their answers are laughably wrong. But crowds rarely act in the absence of social influences, and some researchers in Zurich have now shown that providing individuals information about what their fellow crowd-members are thinking is enough to wipe out the crowd's wisdom.
As the authors of the paper point out, the wisdom of a crowd is actually a statistical phenomenon. Many people have some very rough sense of a given value—in this case, things like the length of Switzerland's border with Italy or its murder rate—but don't know the precise figure. As long as their answers are just as likely to be above or below the actual value, the mis-estimations should cancel each other out. "The wisdom of crowds effect works if estimation errors of individuals are large but unbiased such that they cancel each other out," as the authors put it. That places the mean of the answers somewhere in the neighborhood of the correct one. In some cases, the crowd will actually do better than a group of experts.
The authors, however, realized that most decision making takes place in a social environment—people talk among themselves, compare answers, and get various forms of feedback. So, they decided to test how these processes might influence the wisdom of a crowd. To do so, they asked a panel of a dozen people the same question five times, allowing the participants to change their answer each time. To make sure the answers were serious attempts at getting it right, financial rewards were offered based on the accuracy of the guesses.
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