wisdom of crowds
Group judgment's accuracy
Wisdom of crowds is the principle that aggregate judgments from many people often prove more accurate than individual expert opinions.
The classic example: guessing the weight of an ox at a fair—the average of all guesses beats most individual estimates.
The concept applies to prediction markets, polling, and collaborative filtering: The wisdom of crowds powers Wikipedia's accuracy over time.
It works best when opinions are independent; groupthink undermines it.
- collectiveJointly organized group
- intelligenceMental ability, cognitive capacity
- hive mindUnified group consciousness
- hiveBee dwelling structure
- swarmMass of moving insects
collective behavior · consensus · group decision · crowdsourcing · prediction · markets · voting · aggregation · democracy · popular vote · polling · estimation · guessing · averaging · diversity · opinions · expertise · masses
- crowd wisdomhive mind, hivemind, swarm intelligence, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing
- crowdsourcingcrowdwork, microtask, hits, worker, requester
- collective mindhive mind, hivemind, collective consciousness, collective intelligence, swarm intelligence
- prediction markets
wisdom of crowdsgroupthink
Conformity-driven poor decisions
mob mentality · herd behavior · mob rule · mass hysteria · herd mentality
wisdom of crowdsmass delusion
Widespread false belief shared socially
wisdom, wiser, wisest, wisely, unwise, crowd, crowds, crowded, crowding