If you have a jar full of marbles, you have a lot of marbles. Also, you have an interesting phenomenon; If you ask a group of people to guess the number in the jar, the average of all the guesses will be pretty much spot-on. The wisdom – it is said – of crowds.
But take the average of the guesses when everybody knows what the previous guess was and you ” . . . we bend our decision toward the crowd.” get a skewed value. Solomon Asch’s famous experiment in the 1950’s on conformity (some say the experiment was intended to explore independence) shows the skew quite neatly: One person in a room of nine (or so) confederates all of whom have agreed to pretend that one of the shorter lines of those publicly presented is the longest, even when it is – very obviously – not.
Do this, and between 50% to 80% of the unsuspecting – lone – candidates in each experiment will agree with the group even though they know it to be wrong. Even across variations of this execution in Asch’s study, the average ‘conformity’ was a third.
Either knowingly, or unknowingly, we bend our decision toward the crowd.
Is this how you confound the wisdom of the crowd? By anchoring the guess – fair means or foul?
This is not presented so much as an anthropological or behavioural quirk relating to line length ” . . . we appreciate the world around us in both frictionless and frictionful ways.” (although, it may be that), but as a recognition that we appreciate the world around us in both frictionless and frictionful ways. And, more importantly, [Deity of your choice] help us if we can actually recognise which is which. As Kahneman says:
” . . . there is a really important distinction between natural assessment and things that are not naturally assessed.”
Thank [your deity of choice] for that.
For more on this speak with us, or have a look at our capabilities
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