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
Famous quotes containing the words wisdom of the, wisdom of, wisdom and/or crowd:
“It would not be worth your while to reach the age of seventy if all the wisdom of the world were to be foolishness before God.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“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.
“Those great and glorious actions that dazzle our eyes with their luster are represented by statesmen as the result of great wisdom and excellent design; whereas, in truth, they are commonly the effects of the humors and passions.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)