Cultural Resources
Wisdom of Crowds
Articles/Op-Eds/Essays
Waiting to Deflate, Edward Chancellor.
“In place of Mackay’s intuitive insights into crowd madness, (William J.) Bernstein draws on research in the field of behavioral psychology to distinguish between rational and irrational economic behavior. Under certain conditions, groups of people can make amazingly accurate judgments. [. . .] Bernstein, drawing on James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), describes what’s needed for a crowd to give accurate predictions or estimates: it should display ‘independent individual analysis, diversity of individual experience and expertise, and an effective method for individuals to aggregate their opinions.’
Errors appear when individuals become overly influenced by what others think. ‘The more a group interacts,’ Bernstein writes, ‘the more it behaves like a real crowd, and the less accurate its assessments become…’”
Developing Community Voice, John Sanger.
“Most good conversations occur between individuals that have some level of equality between them. They are generally one-to-one or one-to-few. As more people enter the conversation, you reach a place where there is a power imbalance i.e., there is a leader or a group at the podium that controls the conversation flow, the quality drops rapidly. If the conversation is an open forum with many individuals participating, it is possible to get a flavor for the problems being discussed, but rarely does it build a consensus for the group to resolve the issue.
If you think about how the community interacts with the public and private sectors, you quickly realize it is not a fair process.”
Books
The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki.