Wisdom of Crowds of Crowds Crowds within a crowd outperform 'wisdom of the crowd'

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Introduction: Small Group Conversations

The wisdom of crowds is the concept that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individuals regarding problem-solving, decision-making, and predicting. However, the method can be improved with the wisdom of crowds of crowds.

In the concept of the wisdom of crowds, individuals in a group are privately asked to answer a question, such as how many jelly beans are in a jar. Then when the answers are averaged together, the response provided by the crowd is generally better than for any given individual.

This method can be improved by dividing the crowd into smaller groups and asking the small groups to discuss the question and reach a consensus. The result, when averaged, produces a more accurate figure than the average produced by the large crowd.

This research supports the idea that the Knowledge Café can make a useful collective sensemaking tool. However, there is a big divide between estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar and coming up with an effective response to a complex business or social problem.

The talk below by Mariano Sigman explains the process.

video player (source)
How can groups make good decisions? | Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely

Mariano closes this talk with the following at 07:32 . You can read the transcript below.

Partial Transcript

Good collective decisions require two components: deliberation and diversity of opinions.

Right now, the way we typically make our voice heard in many societies is through direct or indirect voting.

This is good for diversity of opinions, and it has the great virtue of ensuring that everyone gets to express their voice.

But it’s not so good [for fostering] thoughtful debates.

Our experiments suggest a different method that may be effective in balancing these two goals at the same time, by forming small groups that converge to a single decision while still maintaining diversity of opinions because there are many independent groups.

Of course, it’s much easier to agree on the height of the Eiffel Tower than on moral, political, and ideological issues. But in a time when the world’s problems are more complex and people are more polarized, using science to help us understand how we interact and make decisions will hopefully spark interesting new ways to construct a better democracy.

Paper

Resources

• Wikipedia: Wisdom of the crowd
• Blog Post: Crowds within crowd found to outperform ‘wisdom of the crowd’

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Introduction: Small Group Conversations

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