The wisdom of the crowd is the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question. A large group's aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group. An intuitive and often-cited explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise. This process, while not new to the information age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources that rely on human opinion.
The process, in the business world at least, was written about in detail by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.
In the realm of justice, trial by jury can be understood as wisdom of the crowd, especially when compared to the alternative, trial by a judge, the single expert.
In the political domain, sometimes sortition is held as an example of what wisdom of the crowd would look like. Decision making would happen by a diverse group instead of by a fairly homogenous political group or party.
Research within cognitive science has sought to model the relationship between wisdom of the crowd effects and individual cognition.
Read more about Wisdom Of The Crowd: Classic Examples, Definition of Crowd, Benefits, Problems, Analogues With Individual Cognition: The "crowd Within", Higher-dimensional Problems and Modeling, See Also
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“The lesson which these observations convey is, be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the lord’s power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 1:20.
“Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”
—Bible: New Testament 1 Corinthians 3:18-19.
“Marvellous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)