7/12/2014

When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the Mob? NOVA Next | PBS

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Posted by Kristen Clark (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/author/kristen-clark/)

on Thu, 10 Jul 2014

When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the
Mob? (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowdwisdom-goes-wrong)
Our collective belief in the wisdom of the crowds is everywhere these days. From the
democracies that run our cities, states, and countries to sites like Kickstarter and Reddit
where we vote on projects and ideas in the hopes that the best will be rise to the top. But as
recent research suggests, theres a fine line between crowd wisdom and mob madness.
This belief in the intelligence of the crowds has some hard numbers to back it up, going
back at least a century. In 1907, Francis Galton analyzed the entries from a guessing
competition at a farmers fair, in which villagers had guessed the weight of a butchered ox
to win a prize. Although the nearly 800 guesses varied widely, the median came within nine
poundsand the average within a single poundof the 1198 lb ox. This result is, I think,
more creditable to the trust-worthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been
expected, Galton wrote.

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When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the Mob? NOVA Next | PBS

Scientists are deciphering what makes a crowds useful and mobs single-minded.

But one look at a riotous mob after a football game or the aftermath of Irelands housing
bubble will remind you that, collectively, people can often be deeply unwise. So when can
we expect a crowd to head us in the right direction, and when cant we? Recently,
researchers have begun to lay out a set of criteria for when to trust the masses.
First, as evidenced by Galtons ox story, democratic decision-making works well when each
individual first arrives at his or her conclusion independently. Its the moment that people
start influencing each other beforehand that a crowd can run into trouble.
Philip Ball, writing for BBC Future, describes a 2011 study in which participants were asked
to venture educated guesses about a certain quantity, such as the length of the Swiss-Italian
border:
The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were giv en
about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the
centre of this range could drift further from the true v alue. In other words, the
groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy .
This finding challenges a common v iew in management and politics that it is best to
seek consensus in group decision making. What y ou can end up with instead is
herding towards a relativ ely arbitrary position.

Independent decision making isnt everything, though. A crowds diversity can be just as
important. A 2004 study demonstrated that a group of individuals selected at random from
a population outperformed a group of the same populations best problem solvers, Ball

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When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the Mob? NOVA Next | PBS

reports. Individual experts may have been smart on their own, but on average, they were
too similar, working from a narrower range of problem-solving approaches than the
random group. That handicap more than offset their skill.
And a paper presented last month at a conference on collective intelligence takes this
diversity idea one step further. Heres Ball again:
Prev ious work might imply that y ou should add random indiv iduals whose decisions
are unrelated to those of ex isting group members. That would be good, but its better
still to add indiv iduals who arent simply independent thinkers but whose v iews are
negativ ely correlated as different as possible from the ex isting members. In
other words, div ersity trumps independence.

In the days of Facebook filter bubbles and carefully selected TV news pundits, it may now
be harder than ever for our ideas to be truly independent, which could hobble our
combined intelligence. But fortunately, these results show that we can still harness the
wisdom of the crowds, we just need to invite a little dissent into our ranks.
Tell us what you think on Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=%40novapbs+%23novanext+) #novanext,
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/NOVAonline), or email (mailto:nova@wgbh.org?
Subject=NOVA%20Next:%20When+Does+the+Wisdom+of+the+Crowds+Turn+Into+the+Madness+of+the+Mob%3F).
Photo c r edi t: Ger ai nt Row l and/Fl i c k r (CC BY) (https://w w w .f l i c k r .c om/photos/geezaw eezer /7 638306424)

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Funding for NOVA is prov ided by Dav id H. Koch, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, and PBS v iewers.

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