How the wisdom of crowds, and of the crowd within, are affected by expertise

We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50–100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many stars they had just seen. Experiment 1 established that both inner- and outer-crowd wisdom exte...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fiechter, J.L (Author), Kornell, N. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 01820nam a2200193Ia 4500
001 10.1186-s41235-021-00273-6
008 220427s2021 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 23657464 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a How the wisdom of crowds, and of the crowd within, are affected by expertise 
260 0 |b Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH  |c 2021 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00273-6 
520 3 |a We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50–100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many stars they had just seen. Experiment 1 established that both inner- and outer-crowd wisdom extended to our novel task: Single responses alone were less accurate than responses aggregated across a single participant (showing inner-crowd wisdom) and responses aggregated across different participants were even more accurate (showing outer-crowd wisdom). In Experiment 2, prior to beginning the critical trials, participants did 12 practice trials with feedback, which greatly increased their accuracy. There was a benefit of outer-crowd wisdom relative to a single estimate. There was no inner-crowd wisdom effect, however; with high accuracy came highly restricted variance, and aggregating insufficiently varying responses is not beneficial. Our data suggest that experts give almost the same answer every time they are asked and so they should consult the outer crowd rather than solicit multiple estimates from themselves. © 2021, The Author(s). 
650 0 4 |a Crowding 
650 0 4 |a crowding (area) 
650 0 4 |a human 
650 0 4 |a Humans 
700 1 |a Fiechter, J.L.  |e author 
700 1 |a Kornell, N.  |e author 
773 |t Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications