How people use information about the number and distribution of judgments when tapping into the wisdom of the crowds.

Abstract

Using an advice-taking paradigm, we investigated how people use information about the wisdom of the crowds when revising their judgments. We focused on two types of information: information about the size of the advisor crowd and information about the distribution of the judgments within the crowd. To test whether judges use these two types of information, we varied the size of the advisor crowd (two, four, or eight advisors) and orthogonally manipulated whether judges received advice in the form of a crowd estimate or in the form of the separate individual judgments. In a third condition, participants received the crowd estimate, but it was labeled as stemming from an individual. We found no evidence that judges used information about the size of the crowd, but they considered information about the distribution of the advice when revising their opinions. Compared with crowd estimates, receiving the individual judgments as advice led to less advice taking but not to substantial differences in post-advice accuracy. Exploratory analyses showed that judges receiving multiple pieces of advice heeded advice less when their initial judgments were closer to the center of the distribution of judgments. In those instances, their initial judgments were also the most accurate, so they stood to gain less from the advice. Receiving multiple pieces of advice also led to smaller confidence gains, suggesting that judges receiving crowd judgments as advice might underestimate the variance of the underlying individual judgments.

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