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

Maybe democracy would work better...

[traindirector]

Interesting. Maybe democracy would work better if we didn't know the opinions of others, have poll data, or hear media commentary other than candidates speaking and their records...

Re:Maybe democracy would work better...

[traindirector]

This is exactly what happened with George W. Bush's felony wiretapping crimes. The clear fact was that he and his administration, through the NSA's new wiretapping programs, committed multiple wiretapping felonies, each punishable by law by up to five years in prison. Instead of reporting this inconvenient fact, the news "experts" focused on "strategy"--is it a good strategy for Democrats to hold the president to inconvenient standards like the law, when it might make them look weak on security? And somehow this massive crime was talked down into a non-issue, quietly pushed out of the scene, and when people had forgotten about it, swept under the rug by most everyone in power with retroactive immunities.

I think (hope?) that without the "opinion leaders" the outcome would have been very different.

Re:Opinions do *not* need to be hidden

[Verteiron]

Going against the consensus is hard, even if you have been trained or trained yourself to do so.

I was watching TV with my wife's family a few years ago and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" was on. It's not a show I routinely watch but we all had fun shouting answers at the screen. Nice social behavior.

The tricky bit came when a question that fell squarely into one of my big interests came along: "What planet does the moon Titan orbit?"

The answers included Jupiter, Saturn, and a couple of obvious wrong ones. I immediately yelled "Saturn!" while nearly everyone else in the group said "Jupiter!".

Now I KNEW that my answer was right. And some of people with me who said "Jupiter" started to reconsider, because it's common knowledge that I'm a space geek. The lady on the screen hemmed and hawed and finally chose to use one of her "lifelines" to poll the audience for the answer. Something like 80% of the audience said "Jupiter" and all support for my answer among my group fell away.

It was the strangest feeling. I mean, I got up at 2 AM to see the Huygens photographs online. I used to draw pictures of Saturn rising over Titan when I was a kid. I KNEW the answer, and yet with the entire audience and half a family against me I suddenly began to doubt myself. Had I been wrong all these years, suffered some kind of strange delusion? Was Titan a Jovian moon? How could that many people all be wrong?

Of course, a few seconds later the lady correctly answered "Saturn", throwing off the audience opinion and vindicating my chosen response, but it was a very odd sensation for that minute or so before the TV proved me right...