An experiment about the impact of social influence on the wisdom of the crowds' effect

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Sofia
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/12759
• topic: Processos cognitivos; Análise da informação; Dinâmica do grupo; Cooperação; Influência social

Groups have the impressive ability to perform better collectively than the best of its individuals. Galton observed this first in 1907 in his ox weight experiment, but the term wisdom of the crowds (WoC) was coined only later in 2004 by Surowiecki. Cognitive diversity at the individual level enables groups to produce differentiated solutions that ultimately cluster near the true value. By cancelling out the wrongs, the aggregation method exposes the convergence of multiple local optima solutions into one, typically an averaged value that comes incredibly close to the truth-value of what is being estimating. Some accounts suggest that social influence hinders the WoC effect because it diminishes the group diversity resulting in biased outcomes. However, social influence is a naturally occurring phenomenon and it is hardly determinable the extent to which individuals are biased or independent given the complexity of the social interactions. We investigated the impact of social influence on the WoC effect by comparing the collective predictions of 4 groups regarding the number of jellybeans in a jar. We demonstrate that the group disclosing full information performs nearly as well as the control group, where no information was shared. The aggregation method to converge the estimates was the arithmetic mean showing that both groups predicted by approximately 7% the correct number. Statistical analysis has shown that diversity is not affected significantly in the social groups. We conclude that the WoC is not affected by social influence but by the degree of aggregation of the social information shared.