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View Full Version : The Wisdom of Crowds


traynor
07-08-2014, 10:51 AM
"A study in 2011 by a team led by Joseph Simmons of the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut found that group predictions about American football results were skewed away from the real outcomes by the over-confidence of the fans’ decisions, which biased them towards alleged 'favourites' in the outcomes of games."

"The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd-wisdom-goes-wrong

It seems the more "confident" one is in his or her decisions, the less accurate those decisions become. And the more one "shares" her or his opinion with others--and the more one seeks and is aware of the opinion of others (such as watching a tote board) the less accurate one's decisions become.