On How Smart Are the Voices In Your Head?
Have you heard of the wisdom of the crowd? Estimates made by a crowd tend to be more accurate than an individual. But what if that crowd is… the voices in your head?
Everyday we need to make educated guesses - estimations - about things around us. How far is it from my home to my office? How big is the size of the home baking market?
The Wisdom of the Crowd suggests that when tackling judgements like the above, an average of the answers of a large group of people tends to come closer to the truth than an individual’s guess (and even individual experts).
But What About If The Group of People is Actually All in Your Head?
The Wisdom of the Crowd is based on the statistical idea that aggregating diverse and imperfect estimates cancels out the errors. When it comes to cases when there isn’t a crowd around, research has found the same principle also applies to individuals, when multiple estimates from the same person are aggregated. This is known as the Wisdom of the Inner Crowd. A possible reason why multiple guesses from the same person works is because when people make a guess, it’s a sample from a range of possible estimates (and multiple guesses from within that range cancel out the errors).
Resampling an individual might not work well if the individual is anchored to their first guess. So how can we re-estimate in a way that doesn’t bind us to the first answer we spit out?
Two researchers set off to figure out which strategy that coaxes multiple answers from the same person gets the best aggregate estimate.
They tested the research participants in a few ways. Read them and have a guess about which produced the most accurate judgment:
- research participants were made to make an estimate, and then were allowed to make a second guess,
- research participants made an initial estimate and then a second estimate made from the point of view of someone they often agreed with, which were both combined
- research participants made an initial estimate and then a second estimate made from the point of view of someone they often disagreed with, which were both combined
The strategy that yielded the most accurate estimate was actually when participants imagined the estimate of someone they often disagreed with. Fancy that!
The authors argue that their findings score a point on the side of the value of healthy debate and disagreement, which is sometimes seen as a negative thing, in helping get closer to accurate judgments.
It turns out that the voices in your head do have some use - especially when it comes to making estimates (hello, trivia night!).
With love from me (and me) (and me!),
