Tapping Into the Wisdom of Crowds

The simplest illustration of this idea, which I call “the wisdom of crowds,” is an experiment that was first done by a business professor named Jack Treynor, in which he asked a group of 56 people to guess how many jellybeans were in a jar. There were 850 beans in Treynor’s jar. The group’s average guess was 871. That was remarkably close to the right answer, and only one of the 56 people made a more accurate guess.

Or take the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When a contestant on the show is stumped by a question, he can ask the audience for help or consult someone he’s designated as an expert. The experts do a reasonable job: they get the answer right 65 percent of the time. But the audience is much closer to perfect: it gets the answer right 91 percent of the time.

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