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ERIC Number: EJ1285708
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 7
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2365-7464
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
How the Wisdom of Crowds, and of the Crowd Within, Are Affected by Expertise
Fiechter, Joshua L.; Kornell, Nate
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, v6 Article 5 2021
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.
Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-460-1700; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://link-springer-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/ja3xg/
Author Affiliations: N/A