Social Influence and Crowd Wisdom

Groups often perform better than individuals in complex decision-making. Averaging over a collection of independent individual judgments proves a reliable strategy for aggregating information in continuous estimation tasks. Social influence narrows variation in individual opinions and undermines the "wisdom-of-crowds effect". In discrete choice tasks, however, social influence contributes to information aggregation and thus strengthens collective judgment, as Christian Ganser and Marc Keuschnigg show in a recent publication in "Advances in Complex Systems".

Ganser, C., M. Keuschnigg, 2018: Social Influence Strengthens Crowd Wisdom under Voting. Advances in Complex Systems, doi: 10.1142/S0219525918500133.