How to unleash the wisdom of crowds
The great Victorian polymath, Sir Francis Galton was at a country fair in 1906, so the story goes, and came across a competition where you had to guess the weight of an ox. Once the competition was over Galton, an explorer, meteorologist, scientist and statistician, took the 787 guesses and calculated the average, which came to 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds. In effect, the crowd had provided a near perfect answer. Galton would later publish this insight in Nature.
This phenomenon, where collective wisdom is better than most, if not all of the individuals in the crowd has become known as the Wisdom of Crowds. The authoritative take on it came from James Surowiecki. A more up-to-date example is the “Ask the Audience” part of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, where the studio audience are polled and the most popular answer is the correct answer 91% of the time.
Even if there is a better individual guess, you face the problem of deciding which individual’s guess to select. If you choose the crowd’s guess, the decision is made for you and there is every opportunity that you will get a good answer, certainly better than choosing randomly from the other guesses. The technique has practical uses beyond the quiz show.
http://theconversation.com/how-to-unleash-the-wisdom-of-crowds-52774
