Promoting Erroneous Divergent Opinions Increases the Wisdom of Crowds
The aggregation of many lay judgements generates surprisingly accurate estimates. This phenomenon, called the “wisdom of crowds”, has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision making and financial forecasting. Previous research identified two factors driving this effect: the accuracy o...
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Artículo acceptedVersion |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
2024
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://repositorio.utdt.edu/handle/20.500.13098/12785 |
| Aporte de: |
| Sumario: | The aggregation of many lay judgements generates surprisingly accurate estimates. This phenomenon,
called the “wisdom of crowds”, has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision making and
financial forecasting. Previous research identified two factors driving this effect: the accuracy of
individual assessments and the diversity of opinions. Most available strategies to enhance the wisdom of
crowds have focused on improving individual accuracy while neglecting the potential of increasing
opinion diversity. Here, we study a complementary approach to reduce collective error by promoting
erroneous divergent opinions. This strategy proposes to anchor half of the crowd to a small value and the
other half to a large value before eliciting and averaging all estimates. Consistent with our mathematical
modeling, four experiments (N=1362 adults) demonstrate that this method is effective for estimation and
forecasting tasks. Beyond practical implications, these findings offer new theoretical insights into the
epistemic value of collective decision making. |
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