Large-Scale Experiment on the Importance of Social Learning and Unimodality in the Wisdom of the Crowd

TL;DR

This large-scale study investigates how social learning and the unimodality of shared predictions influence the accuracy of collective judgments, revealing that unimodal social information enhances wisdom and identifying individuals who learn better from the crowd.

Contribution

The paper introduces a large, detailed dataset and demonstrates the critical role of unimodality in social information for improving the Wisdom of the Crowd, along with identifying better social learners.

Findings

Unimodal social information improves collective accuracy.

Presence of multiple peaks worsens the Wisdom of the Crowd.

Some individuals are significantly better at learning from social cues.

Abstract

In this study, we build on previous research to understand the conditions within which the Wisdom of the Crowd (WoC) improves or worsens as a result of showing individuals the predictions of their peers. Our main novel contributions are: 1) a dataset of unprecedented size and detail; 2) we observe the novel effect of the importance of the unimodality of the social information shown to individuals: if one does not see only one clear peak in the distribution of the crowd's predictions, the WoC is worsened after social exposure; and 3) we estimate social learning weights that we use to show that there exists individuals who are much better at learning from the crowd and can be filtered to improve collective accuracy.