A new article in Nature highlights an intriguing finding. It’s no particular surprise that the “wisdom of crowds” doesn’t always pick the right answer to a question but this might come as a surprise:
The team asked study participants to answer a given set of questions. Then the researchers asked those respondents to guess how other people would answer. The algorithm then looked for answers that were ‘surprisingly popular’, or more popular than most respondents thought they would be. In most cases, the answers that exceeded expectations were the correct ones.
My interpretation of that is that when operating in a social context people more frequently arrive at the right answers than they do when operating in isolation from each other. It’s something of a scientific validation of the jury system. In the jury system rather than being isolated from one another the jurors deliberate within a social context. It’s not clear to me what practical importance the finding has other than pointing the way to a different and possibly more accurate strategy for taking opinion polls.
It’s like playing Trivia at our local bar. You can play alone or in a team of two or more persons. The largest team is most often among the winners, but the catch is that the reward has to be divided among the team members, with the result that the lone eagle is likely to come out ahead after counting the payouts.