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Zusammenfassung von The Wisdom of Crowds

Name: The Wisdom of Crowds
Rating: 4.4 (77 reviews)
Author: James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few

4.4 (77 Bewertungen)

16 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki explores how a diverse group of individuals can collectively make better decisions than even the smartest individual among them. It challenges our beliefs about the value of individual expertise over group intelligence.

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Big groups can solve problems better than individuals.

At a livestock fair in 1906, scientist Francis Galton observed visitors taking part in a contest to guess an ox’s weight in pounds. The results were surprising: although no individual, including cattle experts, could guess the ox’s exact weight, the mean value of all the visitors’ estimations was a mere pound more than the animal’s actual weight. In other words, the collective estimation was far more accurate than any individual one.

Galton had discovered how a group of people was, indeed, wiser than each of its individual members (including experts).

The television show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is another example of this phenomenon. Candidates on the show have to answer round after round of multiple-choice questions to win the prize and, in the process, can turn to "lifelines" for help. They can use the Ask-the-Expert lifeline to call up an expert for advice, or the Ask-the-Audience lifeline to find out the audience’s opinion. One analysis showed that only 65 percent of the experts were right, while 91 percent of the crowd’s votes were right.

However, a quick glance at history could confirm that not all groups are wise: we witness raging crowds, violent mobs and mindless herd behavior all too often. As Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”

Of course, there are also errors in collective intelligence that can lead a group to make faulty decisions. But if the group manages to stay diverse, work as a team and foster open dialogues, the “wisdom of crowds” is not a meaningless cliché, but actually – as the examples above have shown – the surprising truth.

Big groups can solve problems better than individuals.

The more diverse the group, the wiser its decisions.

Heterogeneous groups are often better at tackling problems than homogeneous ones. In a heterogeneous group – that is, a group of people with different ages, genders, religions and professions – each individual introduces new ideas and perspectives that would have never seen the light of day in a homogeneous one.

Homogeneous groups, such as those made up of experts, are often handicapped by the fact that their members’ skills and approaches are too similar. In other words, it is more difficult for them to consider counterarguments and think unconventionally.

The bigger the group, the more intelligent it is.

As a general rule – as long as we’re talking about people and not clones – the bigger the group, the greater its diversity. And the more diverse it is, the more valuable ideas and skills it brings together.

When it comes to decision making, big groups are usually better at taking account of unusual perspectives and minority opinions because, quite simply, their members come from many different standpoints.

Herd behavior and hierarchies weaken a group’s intelligence.

Since social interactions abound in big groups, their decisions are more likely to be influenced by their members’ social behavior. This can bring about several dangers – herd behavior being one of them.

Herd behavior refers to a widespread social-behavioral pattern within a specific group. It is a defense mechanism by which people support group decisions or actions in order to reduce their own personal risk. Human beings are inherently social creatures, and, as such, they feel safer in the crowd. Take teenagers, for example, who want to do exactly what everybody else is doing, for fear of not fitting in. Whose parents didn’t respond to that by asking, “If all your friends jump off a cliff, are you gonna follow them?”

Groups can be intelligent only if they are made up of many independent thinkers.

The irrational tendencies that arise in every group can be contained only when all its members are able to think independently.

In a group where nobody thinks independently, people usually end up having the same opinion, as this avoids conflicts – even though such conflicts should probably be discussed openly. Contradictions are ignored, or they are reinterpreted to mean something else. The group members take on other people’s views without questioning them, and their ways of thinking grow more and more similar.

The most intelligent groups have decentralized structures but pool their information into one central place.

Big groups are most successful when they have a decentralized structure – that is, when all members can organize themselves and act in small subgroups without being controlled by an omnipotent central leader.

The more invested that members of a group are in solving a problem, and the more independently they work on it, the more likely it is that they will come up with good solutions.

Coordination comes naturally to big groups – as long as everyone doesn’t think only about himself.

The more complex the challenges a group faces, the more it must rely on its members to coordinate themselves.

The key lies in the members’ ability to agree upon their intentions, expectations and actions. Individuals shouldn’t think and act only in their own interest, but keep an eye on the bigger picture and put themselves in the shoes of other group members.

People cooperate in groups when they believe they will gain long-term benefits.

As social creatures, human beings are used to working in groups. But such groups function only when all of their members put aside their selfish, short-term interests for the long-term benefit of the group.

One way to encourage such behavior is to establish laws and rules. States can punish their citizens if they evade taxes or murder their neighbors, and companies can let their employees go if they do not fulfill their duties or if they harass their coworkers.

Final Summary

The key message of this book is:

Under the right circumstances, groups of people can not only make surprisingly intelligent decisions, but even produce better results than could a group of experts or the smartest individuals in those groups.

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Worum geht es in The Wisdom of Crowds?

The Wisdom of Crowds explores why, and under which circumstances, groups of people can come up with better solutions to problems than any one person – even if that person is an expert. By analyzing the way individuals and groups make decisions, the book gets to the bottom of the wisdom of crowds, and shows how this wisdom can be used to make reliable decisions.

Wer The Wisdom of Crowds lesen sollte

Anyone who wants to know why a group of people can be wiser than individual experts
Anyone who wants to know which circumstances make groups’ decisions even more effective
Anyone who wants to know why working in groups makes sense in many situations

Über den Autor

James Surowiecki is an American journalist. He writes a column on financial matters for The New Yorker, and has published articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

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