Wisdom of The Crowd Might Just Be Stupid

Birds migrating for the winter. Voting for a presidential candidate in a certain state. Wanting to be successful at Stanford. Everybody is influenced by information cascades within the networks closest to them and for often times good reason. However, studies performed by Arizona State University and Uppsula University might disagree. In an article published by The Atlantic, it’s explained that the wisdom of the crowd “actually worse than individuals at choosing between two options, one of which is vastly superior to the other. When the choice is easy, in other words, the crowd can actually be pretty dumb. To prove this, an experiment with ants was performed when choosing a new habitat to infest.

 

In summary, they had two test groups: individual ants and colonies of ants. They then had the two test groups choose between two houses of varying qualities: one that was always more ideal for the habitat of ants than the other, and recorded the probability of the 2 groups choosing correctly. They found that when the decision was harder to make (the houses were very close in quality, the colony of ants outperformed the individual ants. When the choice of house was completely obvious however, the individual ants outperformed the colony of ants. Here is a graph of the results.

 

 

The reason for the stupidity of the colony of ants can be explained by the phenomena known as information cascades. Researchers found that when the ants searched the houses as groups, if the first couple of ants first stumbled upon the house poorer in quality, the ones that followed would see them there and believe that this house was superior without even checking the other house. However, the individual ants would still go on and check the other house. When asked if this phenomena could be seen in humans, the article brought up soccer riots, terror groups, and mobs. People can easily be blinded by the decisions of others without doing their own thinking. The lesson here: think for yourself.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-stupidity-of-the-crowd/278188/