why does social influence lead to consensus? What is the benefit of consensus if the consensus opinion is different from the Wisdom of the Crowd opinion (and hence, sub-optimal)?

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.