Wisdom and Group Think in 'Wisdom of the Crowd'
The wisdom of the crowd theory states that a group of people that don't talk to each other will be better at guessing the right answer or the outcome to an event compared to any individual expert. If they do start to share their opinions, the influence from basic exposure to other information and regular social influences will produce groupthink that destroys the wisdom of the crowd.
Source
Research has questioned this model by showing how this might not be the case exactly. For example, according to polls and the general consensus for the outcome of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, the wisdom of the crowd said Hillary Clinton would win. Yet this wasn't the case.
Inaccurate Information
What went wrong? Wisdom of the crowd is really in the network. People need to be able to share information and talk to each other, then the crowd with get smarter overall. By sharing information, the accuracy of the decisions made by individuals in a group will increase. But it can also lead to charismatic "opinion leading" individuals whose inaccurate information can influence the group in the wrong direction. Accuracy doesn't win out if inaccurate information is propagated more strongly and widely.
This contradicts the original wisdom of the crowd theory. The research shows that if you let people talk to each other then they're influenced by other people's information and conform to what others are saying, rather than what they honestly think the right answer is. This has been demonstrated to occur in Asch conformity experiments:
Asch Conformity Experiment
Networking
The particular accuracy of an outcome or answer will depend on the networks formed between individuals. If people aren't very accurate on their own, when they talk to each other they can help improve their accuracy overall. Think of averages, if one guess is too low and the other too high, they might agree to somewhere in the middle and guess more accurately relative to the less accurate guess.
The thing about these networks that are formed is that they have to be egalitarian, meaning everyone has to have an equal influence to have their voices heard and influence everyone else. This produces a strong social learning effect overall and improves the quality of everyone's judgments in the group.
Exchanging Ideas
While exchanging ideas can help make everyone smarter, influential opinion leaders can derail that process and have people judge more poorly. A trusted opinion leader can be accurate in their area of expertise, but when they venture too far from it and are erroneous in their judgments, they continue be influential in the decisions other people make.
Study
The study had 1300 people in three different experimental conditions:
- egalitarian networks of equal contact and influence;
- centralized networks with a single opinion leader who obviously had more influence;
- a control group of no social networks.
Given estimation challenges, participants had 3 chances to guess the number of calories in a plate of food. The first response was completely on their own. Then the groups that had social networks could see the guesses of others and revise their own answer for a second-guess, and repeat again for a third and final guess. The control group had individuals guess all on their own.
Egalitarian Networked Groups
The control group's accuracy was true to the original wisdom of the crowd theory, but they didn't improve after they kept revising their answers, and some got worse. However, all of the egalitarian networked groups had the same initial wisdom of the crowd but also had an increase in accuracy after they started to network and share their answers.
"In a situation where everyone is equally influential people can help to correct each other's mistakes. This makes each person a little more accurate than they were initially. Overall, this creates a striking improvement in the intelligence of the group. The result is even better than the traditional wisdom of the crowd! But, as soon as you have opinion leaders, social influence becomes really dangerous."
The wisdom of the crowd in the egalitarian network is reliable because those who are more accurate usually make smaller revisions than those who are less accurate who make larger revisions to their guesses. The average of the group then moves towards those who are more accurate which ends up representing the overall wisdom of the crowd.
When scientists or engineers are trying to figure something out, they might think that avoiding contamination of the opinions of others is better for them to not get into groupthink, but they're likely to arrive at more accurate judgments by sharing and cooperating than by remaining independent.
With this new understanding, we can see how the classic theory of the wisdom of the crowds signaled that Hillary Clinton was going to win, when the opposite happened and Donald Trump won. Trump spoke of things plainly. He related to people who saw evident truths that they recognized the establishment wouldn't talk about honestly.
Trump as the opinion leader, and the networks of groups that they belonged to, influenced people's decisions. Despite not being an expert or knowing what he is talking about on certain things, the establishment underestimated how much influence Trump had on the topics he was right about. He resonated with a lot of Americans and gained their trust and their vote, winning the election.
Wisdom of the crowd was wrong about Hilary Clinton winning because the model lacked a better explanation for how crowd wisdom and group think work to push and pull people towards more or less accurate information. Speaking some truth and mixing in opinion can heavily impact people and influence their decisions. Also, false information that appeals to people or carries an aura or authority can influence them to spread it to others, making misinformation or disinformation go viral.
References:
- New findings refute groupthink, proving that wisdom of crowds can prevail
- Wisdom of the crowd
- Asch conformity experiments
- Joshua Becker el al., "Network dynamics of social influence in the wisdom of crowds," PNAS (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1615978114
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There's something called self-loafing that's very similar. One explanation is that when people are in a group they're less likely to work as hard as they might alone... But the aspect I'm talking about is that if you put one really smart person in a group of say 5 "dummies" rather than bring the overall level of the group up, the smart person is brought down to the level of the group (or less).
Indeed, working towards the lowest common denominator ;) Socialism and communism does that well :/
The collective mediocrity! I think Communism/Socialism lowers the bar even further killing all innovation- an ideology based on parasitism!
Jeez a lot of us are on a similar wavelength today, I just wrote something similar to this. I'd tell you to check it out but I think you did better than I did, which is why I resteemed.
Yes! This is what I've been trying to get at for the last 2 days. Such a crucial point!
Yup. That's what my post linked to up there was about too, for a real community,all voices need to heard to have power in how a community operates. Unanimous decision making for maximizing freedom. Thanks for the support ;)
" let people talk to each other then they're influenced by other people's information and conform to what others are saying, rather than what they honestly think the right answer is."
Very much so :)
Which then leads to blaming those who came up with a certain idea, in case it turns out to be detrimental. It is always easier to point with the finger at others and leave them holding the baby. But we very well see that WE were the ones who let it come that far by deciding to evade own independent internal decision-making and stick to it. OUR choice.
The ego's evasion from responsibility brings short-term comfort at best (relief after successful escape), yet long-term discomfort.
Own decision-making brings short-term discomfort at worst ( external re-action trusting our faith in our own decision, or: our ego's doubt reflected externally), yet long-term comfort.
All points you list are very valid and true, noting to add ;)
Hello @krnel : I need to point out here is that regarding the license attribution of images. Some images of your post especially the flickr one which I looked into is a CC BY 2.0 one. One of the wiki image is CC-by-4.0 one. It requires appropriate credit and attribution mentioning. Three things are always necessary:
This is not a criticism. I appreciate your quality content very much. I think you will take this in a good spirit. I am giving a snapshot from CC-ver-2 page here:
Let me know your opinion.
--
@dexterdev
Alright, thanks. I will change the structure of sources for future steemstem posts. Thanks for the help.
Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes. Mass can be interpreted as a form of collectivism (togetherness). Therefore the psychology of the mass will relate the behavior carried out jointly by a group of masses. This phenomenon of togetherness is also termed as Collective Behavior (Collective Behavior)
In collective behavior, a person or group of people wants to make a social change in their group, its institutions, the community. These group actions are organized, and there are also unorganized actions. This organized action is then widely known as the social movement (Social Movement).
Collective behavior in the form of social movements, often arise when in social interactions that occur unstructured situation, ambigious (coercion / confusing), and unstable.
Reicher & Potter (1985) identifies the five basic types of errors in the psychology of the crowd (mass behavior) in the past and the present. These include: (1) the abstraction of the crowded episodes from inter-group conflict, (2) the failure to explain the dynamic process, (3) the excessive anonymity of its membership, (4) the failure to understand the motives of the members of the crowd, and (5) always emphasize the negative aspects of the crowd.
Reicher (1987), Reicher & Potter (1985) has seen the existence of two (2) forms of bias in view of crowds theory that is political bias and perspective bias. Political bias occurs because the crowd theory is structured as an attempt to maintain the social order of mobs and the action of the crowd is always seen as a social conflict. Meanwhile, perspective bias occurs because experts only act as outsiders who only observe the problem. As a result, there was a mistake in viewing the crowd's action objectively.
good luck continue to sir @krnel. thank you
Fascinating video and research! Yes folks can be easily influenced to conform. That of course makes to true feelings and opinions impure and misleading. Folks thought Clinton would win. In the end we were able to vote our heart for those places that were not rigged. And as a result a new outcome occurred. I would hate to see what would have happened has she won. LOL Thanks @krnel.
Sorry. Fat fingered that one. Did not mean to down vote anyone.
Yes, Hilary would be worse.
Thank you so much for this effort. My contribution is that this topic cannot be understood until one abandons the notions that people are rational entities who exchange information. There is no such thing as information. We are wet computers. Everything is software.
Once you look at people's brains as programmable computers, the issue takes on a whole new character. In those terms, what you are discussing involves the propogation of competing "software viruses" within a massively parallel computer, with each person thought of as a "node".
Another contribution: People neglect the power and importance of inspiration (from God). Each new history-changing idea first emerges as the thought of one person, typically one man, who sees things in a way that no one else sees them. That man must fight, often for years, to promote this thing that only he can see, until after much effort, a few others see it.
Mind-viruses still propagate information. Saying there is no such thing as information is false. But yes a lot of us is "programmable".
Well, it's not false. It's a way of looking at it. "Information" is an illusion in the same way and for the same reason that "Self" is an illusion. To get what I am saying, treat it as poetry, not as a statement of logic.
very informative post @krnel. i liked reading it. Some questions arise:
when the crowd is large like it is during elections, how can we assume that it is an egalitarian networked group? Typically most people in this world will not do independent research and will sift through other's perceptions to make their own decision. in this case, is it possible that all that we have to do was to resonate with a few and then the group mentality would take over? If an election is close in terms of vote share then does it mean that there are more independent networked thinkers? Is the popular vote due to an egalitarian networked group or centralized group?
thanks
It wasn't egalitarian because of the limits of interaction, and not everyone had access to correct info to revise their decisions, or wanted to go look fro info to learn mroe ;). Partly egalitarian, partly centralized might be the outcome? I'm not sure...
Dear @krnel.. It's great post about wisdom of
crowd.. I am watching your vedio .. it's appricate me to know that.. we know wisdom vs. Intelligence. Although people value intelligence understanding, reasoning, the ability to learn—they also respect wisdom, or the knowledge and experience that we accumulate over a lifetime.
Wisdom is one of those qualities difficult to define because it encompasses so much but which people generally recognize when they encounter it.
Wisdom of the World has been forming alliances with the pioneering individuals, organizations and initiatives which are featured below who have vast experience and networks.
Thanks for sharing a great post . keep going sir. Best of luck.
interesting, in what areas and situations this theory applies