Is the true “wisdom of the crowd” to copy successful individuals?
Open accessAbstract
Diversity of expertise at an individual level can increase intelligence at a collective level-a type of swarm intelligence (SI) popularly known as the 'wisdom of the crowd'. However, this requires independent estimates (rare in the real world owing to the availability of public information) and contradicts people's bias for copying successful individuals. To explain these inconsistencies, 429 people took part in a 'guess the number of sweets' exercise. Guesses made with no public information were diverse, resulting in highly accurate SI. Individuals with access to the previous guess, mean guess or a randomly chosen guess, tended to over-estimate the number of sweets and this undermined SI. However, when people were provided with the current best guess, this prevented very large (inaccurate) guesses, resulting in convergence of guesses towards the true value and accurate SI across a range of group sizes. Thus, contrary to previous work, we show that social influence need not undermine SI, especially where individual decisions are made sequentially and then aggregated. Furthermore, we offer an explanation for why people have a bias to recruit and follow experts in team settings: copying successful individuals can enable accuracy at both the individual and group level, even at small group sizes.
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After social influence, error distributions tend to become widespread, covering a greater proportion of high error values, regardless of the aggregating method.
“We find that the error distributions tend to become widespread, now covering a greater proportion of also high error values after social influence, regardless of the aggregating method.”
From Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation (2013) · cites this paper as [35]
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- Authors
- King, A. J., Cheng, L., Starke, S. D., & Myatt, J. P.
- Affiliations
- University of London (GB)
- Venue
- Biology Letters
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2011-09-14
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 197-200
- ISSN
- 1744-9561 (ISSN-L)
- 1744-957X
- PMC
- PMC3297389
- OpenAlex
- W2163540993
- Cited by
- 61
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 4.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Biology Letters (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- University of Birmingham Research Portal (University of Birmingham) (publishedVersion)
- RVC Research Online (Royal Veterinary College) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H013016/1)
- Natural Environment Research Council (NE/H016600/2, NE/H016600/3)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, social influence, expertise, group decision making, sequential decision making, overestimation, group size, expert recruitment
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, England, Humans, Intelligence, Judgment, Regression Analysis, Social Behavior
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