Social Influence and the Wisdom of Crowd Effect

formfeed writes "A lot has been written lately on the crowd effect and the wisdom of crowds. But for those of us who are doubtful, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has published a study showing how masses can become dumber: social influence. While previous studies show how groups of people can come up with remarkably accurate results, it seems 'even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.' Social influence 'diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.' In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden."

Comments

Re:That is why we have stupid political parties.

[HornWumpus]

By the Muslim definition of 'Muslim' Obama is an Apostate Muslim.

According to Muslim tradition a person is a Muslim if their father is a Muslim or if they ever repeat the 'call to prayer' (which is apparently a 'profession of faith'.)

Obama meets both these criteria.

Of course in the rest of the world, where we get to pick our own religion, he is non practicing Christian.

Some examples of things liberals continue to believe that are factually incorrect: Nazi's where capitalists, blankets can be 'infected with smallpox', FDR shortened the great depression, GWB was a deserter, Bill Clinton respects women.