Wisdom of the crowd

Day 356 / 366

I have always noticed how when a crowd of people is singing along, say at a concert, their collective voice is almost perfectly in key. The individuals might be singly grossly off-key, but somehow they all cancel each other out.

Today I came across a similar concept when it comes to information. There is a phenomenon known as “Wisdom of the crowd”, which states that the collective opinion of a group of people is more accurate than the opinions of a single expert.

Back in 1906, a country fair held a competition where farmers had to guess the weight of an ox. 800 people participated but no one was able to make a good enough guess. The mathematician Sir Francis Galton found that the median of all the estimates was really accurate, just 1% off the actual weight.

One thing to keep in mind though is that for this experiment to work, we need to get the individual opinions privately so that they are not affected by what the rest of the crowd is saying. This is why this theory might not work for online crowds like Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. The bias caused by the opinion of highly active users, or even bots will skew the collective opinion and it can no longer be considered close to the truth.