An official website of the United States government
Individuals today discuss information and form judgements as crowds in online communities and platforms. “Wisdom of the crowd” arguments suggest that, in theory, crowds have the capacity to bring together diverse expertise, pooling distributed knowledge and thereby solving challenging and complex problems. This paper concerns one way that crowds might fall short of this ideal. A large body of research in the social psychology of small groups concerns the shared information bias, a tendency for group members to focus on common knowledge at the expense of rarer information which only one or a few individuals might possess. We investigated whether this well-known bias for small groups also impacts larger crowds of 30 participants working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We found that crowds failed to adequately pool distributed facts; that they were partially biased in how they shared facts; and that individual perception of group decisions was unstable. Nonetheless, we found that aggregating individual reports from the crowd resulted in moderate performance in solving the assigned task.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2026
Stakeholder diversity matters: employing the wisdom of crowds for data-poor fisheries assessments
Abstract Embracing local knowledge is vital to conserve and manage biodiversity, yet frameworks to do so are lacking. We need to understand which, and how many knowledge holders are needed to ensure that management recommendations arising from local knowledge are not skewed towards the most vocal individuals. Here, we apply a Wisdom of Crowds framework to a data-poor recreational catch-and-release fishery, where individuals interact with natural resources in different ways. We aimed to test whether estimates of fishing quality from diverse groups (multiple ages and years of experience), were better than estimates provided by homogenous groups and whether thresholds exist for the number of individuals needed to capture estimates. We found that diversity matters; by using random subsampling combined with saturation principles, we determine that targeting 31% of the survey sample size captured 75% of unique responses. Estimates from small diverse subsets of this size outperformed most estimates from homogenous groups; sufficiently diverse small crowds are just as effective as large crowds in estimating ecological state. We advocate for more diverse knowledge holders in local knowledge research and application.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10643699
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Collective intelligence Fisheries management Indigenous and local knowledge Recreational fisheries Wisdom of crowds
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Individuals and organizations increasingly use online plat- forms to broadcast difficult problems to crowds. According to the “wisdom of the crowd” because crowds are so large they are able to bring together many diverse experts, effectively pool distributed knowledge, and thus solve challenging problems. In this study we test whether crowds of increasing size, from 4 to 32 members, perform better on a classic psychology problem that requires pooling distributed facts.more » « less
-
Patterns of collective motion in bird flocks, fish schools and human crowds are believed to emerge from local interactions between individuals. Most ‘flocking' models attribute these local interactions to hypothetical rules or metaphorical forces and assume an omniscient third-person view of the positions and velocities of all individuals in space. We develop a visual model of collective motion in human crowds based on the visual coupling that governs pedestrian interactions from a first-person embedded viewpoint. Specifically, humans control their walking speed and direction by cancelling the average angular velocity and optical expansion/contraction of their neighbours, weighted by visibility (1 − occlusion). We test the model by simulating data from experiments with virtual crowds and real human ‘swarms'. The visual model outperforms our previous omniscient model and explains basic properties of interaction: ‘repulsion' forces reduce to cancelling optical expansion, ‘attraction' forces to cancelling optical contraction and ‘alignment' to cancelling the combination of expansion/contraction and angular velocity. Moreover, the neighbourhood of interaction follows from Euclid's Law of perspective and the geometry of occlusion. We conclude that the local interactions underlying human flocking are a natural consequence of the laws of optics. Similar perceptual principles may apply to collective motion in other species.more » « less
-
Abstract Social‐ecological systems like fisheries provide food, livelihoods and recreation. However, lack of data and its integration into governance hinders their conservation and management. Stakeholders possess site‐specific knowledge crucial for confronting these challenges. There is increasing recognition that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) is valuable, but structural differences between ILK and quantitative archetypes have stalled the assimilation of ILK into fisheries management, despite acknowledged bias and uncertainty in scientific methods. Conducting a systematic review of fisheries‐associated ILK research (n = 397 articles), we examined how ILK is accessed, applied, distributed across space and species, and has evolved. We show that ILK has generated qualitative, semi‐quantitative and quantitative information for diverse taxa across 98 countries. Fisheries‐associated ILK research mostly targets small‐scale and artisanal fishers (70% of studies) and typically uses semi‐structured interviews (60%). We revealed large variability in sample size (n = 4–7638), predicted by the approach employed and the data generated (i.e. qualitative studies target smaller groups). Using thematic categorisation, we show that scientists are still exploring techniques, or ‘validating’ ILK through comparisons with quantitative scientific data (20%), and recording qualitative information of what fishers understand (40%). A few researchers are applying quantitative social science methods to derive trends in abundance, catch and effort. Such approaches facilitate recognition of local insight in fisheries management but fall short of accepting ILK as a valid complementary way of knowing about fisheries systems. This synthesis reveals that development and increased opportunities are needed to bridge ILK and quantitative scientific data.more » « less
-
Abstract We present a wisdom of crowds study where participants are asked to order a small set of images based on the number of dots they contain and then to guess the respective number of dots in each image. We test two input elicitation interfaces—one elicits the two modalities of estimates jointly and the other independently. We show that the latter interface yields higher quality estimates, even though the multimodal estimates tend to be more self-contradictory. The inputs are aggregated via optimization and voting-rule based methods to estimate the true ordering of a larger universal set of images. We demonstrate that the quality of collective estimates from the simpler yet more computationally-efficient voting methods is comparable to that achieved by the more complex optimization model. Lastly, we find that using multiple modalities of estimates from one group yields better collective estimates compared to mixing numerical estimates from one group with the ordinal estimates from a different group.more » « less
