Are We Wise About the Wisdom of Crowds? The Use of Group Judgments in Belief Revision

Four studies examining intuitions about group wisdom and the informational influence of groups find that when provided advice, participants relied more on groups than individuals to update their beliefs, but were only modestly sensitive to group size.

Abstract

Recent research has advanced our understanding of how people use the advice of others to update their beliefs. Because groups and teams play a significant role in organizations and collectively are wiser than their individual members, it is important to understand their influence on belief revision as well. I report the results of four studies examining intuitions about group wisdom and the informational influence of groups. In their overt assessments, experimental participants rated larger groups as more accurate than smaller groups and discriminated more between them when group size was salient. When provided advice, participants relied more on groups than individuals to update their beliefs, but were only modestly sensitive to group size. Most were suboptimal in the use of that advice, overweighting their initial beliefs and underweighting the more valid judgment of the group. Thus although acknowledged in principle, the wisdom of crowds is only shallowly manifest in observed behavior.