Accepting “majority” as “correct” has been so
powerful that Galileo did not dare to reveal the fact about rotation of the earth
around the sun. This is because it has been though that if something is true,
it is seen by most of the people. But it is not always the case as we saw in
the two papers of How Social Influence Can Undermine the Wisdom of crowd
effect and Effects of Social Influence on the Wisdom of Crowds; more
does not imply better
Now, our first question is why social influence
leads to consensus. It seems obvious that one of the main reasons is uncertainty
about the answer of the question and also lack of absolute confidence. I doubt
if an individual who is completely sure about the answer or at least thinks so
is willing to change his opinion just because others say something else.
Our second question is that: What is the
benefit of consensus if the consensus opinion is different from the Wisdom of
the Crowd opinion?
According to above two papers, necessary
conditions for consensus to be optimal are diversity, independence of opinions,
specialization in expert knowledge and a mechanism for aggregating individual
opinions. How far the initial individuals’ estimation is from the true answer
is also important. According to Mavrodiev et al. if the average initial estimations is
close to the truth, only a short and mild interaction would be enough to get
closer to reality but keeping it on would divert the aggregate opinion from
truth. However if the initial estimation is relatively, interaction would make it
better.
In addition to these I want to add some more
which I believe have serious effects on “collective intelligence” which in turn
modulate the effect of social influence on consensus:
1-
What kind of information is shared; only the final
output result or the reasons behind that. In the case of revealing only the
output answer, the density of a particular answer would be much important than
the time members also give their reasons for their opinions. Because in the
latter case, even if the related opinion is not very common, those mentioned
reasons can motivate others to be in agreement with them.
2-
Also knowing WHO says what is vital especially
if the background and career of the group members are known.
