Knowledgeable Individuals Protect The Wisdom Of Crowds

Jan Lorenz recently found the same thing. Swiss college students can form a wise crowd when answering questions independently, but once they could find out what their peers had guessed, their answers became more inaccurate. In his summary of the study, Jonah Lehrer wrote, “The range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses.”

Is the crowd doomed to groupthink? Not quite. King found that he could steer them back towards a wiser guess by giving them the current best guess. When this happened, the median returned to a respectable 795. So the crowd loses its wisdom when it gets random pieces of information about what its members think, but it regains its wisdom if it finds out what the most successful individual said.

King says that this mirrors what happens in real life. The crowd may be a social beast, but it isn’t an indiscriminate one. Certain individuals wield disproportionate influence, and groups of soldiers, employees, players and even animals often rely on leaders when they make decisions.

There’s a reason for this. When King provided his volunteers with the best previous guess, their range of answers was narrower with fewer extreme predictions. Their collective answers were also about as accurate in small groups of 10 people as they were in larger ones of 70. King writes, “Copying successful individuals can enable accuracy at both the individual and group level, even at small group sizes.”

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