The Influential Mind Made Me Think #15: More On Crowd Wisdom

In the last edition of The Influential Mind Made Me Think, we talked about crowd wisdom. In order to bring out the good and mitigate the bad when reaching a decision as a group, we need to make sure that the opinion of each person is not being influenced by any others. In other words, we need to make sure that the variables we are using to make a decision are independent. If there is no independence, then tallying many opinions will not make you reach a wiser conclusion. Furthermore, I want to dedicate this post to another possible weakness of crowd wisdom. In the past post, the example I used was people trying to predict the weight of an ox. I showed how the average of all the guesses is actually really close to the actual weight of the ox. Nevertheless what happens when the general population is being bias?

From cognitive biases to errors in decision-making and forecasts, the human brain has evolved for greatness but has preserved countless biases. (Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind)

Imagine we are trying to figure out the weight of the same ox we used in the previous example. We already proved that the average of the guesses will be very close to the result. But, what would happen if we make this ox stand next to a really skinny one? Research suggests that the perception of the population will be shifted upwards. In other words, our guesses for the ox would be higher than if it was to stand alone. This is because our brains perceive everything in a relative manner. People's opinions can be interdependent, but also bias and systematically wrong. Yet, our "gut" often tells us to go with the majority. In the group of people sharing their opinion, for sure there will be ones that know what they are talking about while some others might have no idea. So could giving different weights to different people's opinions help you reach a better conclusion? Yes, but it is not easy. "Equality bias", coined by Bahador Bahrami, refers to the idea that when making decisions, we often revert to the easy strategy of weighing everyone's opinion equally, regardless of people's reliability or expertise. Avoiding it can be really hard, but finding the experts in the crowd can be rewarding.

We, as a species tend to be irrationally optimistic. Another very well known example of how we can make systematic errors can be found in project managing. Any project manager for any industry can tell you how projects are always estimated to be cheaper and shorter than they actually are. It does not matter how many previous projects or experience people have, they will still miscalculate the price and duration of them. In some way, this systematic errors make perfect sense. Most people's brains are wired in a similar manner, so we tend to fail in the same places.

Pixabay image source.

Your "gut" may direct you toward the majority, but keep in mind that even in our world of ratings and reviews, tallying and averaging many views can lead to suboptimal solutions. (Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind)

As always, I share information with the hope of bettering everyday interactions or decision-making. So, next time when tallying, sampling, and eliciting opinions, we need to remember to pause. We must asses the likelihood that people's opinions are interdependent, bias, and finally, we must consider if the opinions should be weighted unequally. Once we have taken all those steps, then maybe we will be able to reach better decisions. As I say in every post, all we can aim for is more awareness. In some sense, yes there is wisdom in the crowds, but we need to know how to extract it. Sometimes the wisdom might be held by a minority.

What do you think? I'd like to hear your opinions.

In the past, I was sharing all the links to the posts of this series. Now that the series has a decent amount of posts, I will only share the ones that I think are most correlated with the current post. So, if you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, and are related to this post, click on these past posts:

With this post, The Influential Mind Made Me Think is saying goodbye. In the future I might make a post that has quick links to each edition of the series and a short summary of each, for easy access. In addition, I might add a short general thought on the book as a whole. Nevertheless, as single informative posts, this is the last. I hope you have enjoyed it and learned as much as I have.

Best,

@capatazche