The Wisdom of Many in One Mind: Improving Individual Judgments With Dialectical Bootstrapping
Psychological Science, Volume 20, Number 2, pp. 231-237(7)
Herzog, Stefan M., Hertwig, Ralph
The “wisdom of crowds” in making judgments about the future or other
unknown events is well established. The average quantitative estimate
of a group of individuals is consistently more accurate than the
typical estimate, and is sometimes even the best estimate. Although
individuals' estimates may be riddled with errors, averaging them
boosts accuracy because both systematic and random errors tend to
cancel out across individuals. We propose exploiting the power of
averaging to improve estimates generated by a single person by using an
approach we call dialectical bootstrapping. Specifically, it
should be possible to reduce a person's error by averaging his or her
first estimate with a second one that harks back to somewhat different
knowledge. We derive conditions under which dialectical bootstrapping
fosters accuracy and provide an empirical demonstration that its
benefits go beyond reliability gains. A single mind can thus simulate
the wisdom of many.
Read this article
Photo by EarlWorld