Silence Routing: When Not Speaking Improves Collective Judgment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a routing framework for collective judgment in taste-related domains, showing that selectively silencing contributors enhances prediction accuracy by effectively utilizing social signals.

Contribution

It proposes a novel signal routing framework that determines when contributors should speak or remain silent to improve collective taste judgments.

Findings

Silence improves prediction accuracy in taste judgments.

Routing enables effective use of second-order social signals.

Gains are conditional on proper routing and silence use.

Abstract

The wisdom of crowds has been shown to operate not only for factual judgments but also in matters of taste, where accuracy is defined relative to an individual's preferences. However, it remains unclear how different types of social signals should be selectively used in such domains. Focusing on a music preference dataset in which contributors provide both personal evaluations (Own) and estimates of population-level preferences (Estimated), we propose a routing framework for collective intelligence in taste. The framework specifies when contributors should speak, what they should report, and when silence is preferable. Using simulation-based aggregation, we show that prediction accuracy improves over an all-own baseline across a broad region of the parameter space, conditional on items where routing applies. Importantly, these gains arise only when silence is allowed, enabling second-order signals to function effectively. The results demonstrate that collective intelligence in matters of taste depends on principled signal routing rather than simple averaging.