Is it wise to trust digital crowds?

Whenever I go online to order something and look at customer reviews, doubts may pop into my mind. Sometimes, I have second thoughts about what I’m ordering. Should I really buy it, or shouldn’t I? But more frequently, I wonder about the ratings I’m looking at. Why should I trust all these people making their opinions known over the Internet? Is it wise to trust digital crowds in this way?

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In short, crowdsourced ratings or reviews about products, services, and businesses—not to mention highly opinionated posts about these things on social media—often raise a question about trust. How can we know whether any of these online opinions come from trustworthy sources or crowds?

Among the schools of thought that try to answer this question, there are both optimistic arguments about the wisdom of crowds and pessimistic warnings about the madness of crowds. There’s probably truth to both sides, but how can we know if a crowd is wise or mad? To start, let’s define our terms. What do we mean by crowd wisdom vs. crowd madness?

Crowd wisdom: When to trust crowds

Crowd wisdom refers to a kind of group intelligence. It doesn’t come from the effort of just one person. Rather, it emerges from the collaboration of multiple people. When everyone’s contributions are combined, weighted, and averaged, the result is a collective belief known as crowd wisdom.

Crowd wisdom is a concept you typically hear about in statistics. In fact, the most famous story about crowd wisdom is an anecdote about Sir Francis Galton, a major pioneer of statistics. It involves an ox in a weight-guessing contests, as well as a lot of guesstimates, or estimates of guesswork.

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Guesstimates

While investigating a weight-guessing contest, Galton realized that no single individual could usually guess the correct weight of an ox. Nevertheless, the crowd’s average answer could correctly estimate the ox’s weight.

In other words, when individuals tried to guess the weight, their answers were mostly way off. But when all their guesses were combined, weighted, and averaged, the resulting estimate—or guesstimate—ended up being the correct answer (or at least extremely close to the correct answer).

Similar investigations have uncovered many other forms of crowd wisdom. Common examples include guesstimating somebody’s height or the number of beans in a jar. Although any individual’s guess may miss the mark, the average estimate of everybody’s guess is likely to be very accurate.

When to trust digital crowds: online ratings and reviews

So, do guesstimates show that it’s a good idea to trust crowds, including digital crowds? Well, in the case of guesstimating, the answer is generally yes!

In many cases, it’s reasonable to trust digital crowds for things like online reviews or ratings of products, services, and businesses. Take any single review or rating, and it may or may not be accurate. But take the average rating, and it can serve as a reliable guesstimate of how most people would evaluate something.

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Crowd madness: When not to trust crowds

Having said that, there are plenty of cases when it’s not always a good idea to trust digital crowds … which brings us to the topic of crowd madness, or highly irrational, outrageous, or extreme behavior by the masses.

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What makes crowd wisdom different from crowd madness

In order to trust digital crowds for things like online reviews and ratings, there are assumptions we must be able to make to ensure crowd wisdom (and not crowd madness) is what’s at play.

First, crowd wisdom works well for guesstimating clear-cut answers to simple questions. It doesn’t work for figuring out multivariate solutions to complex problems.

• For the most part, crowd wisdom applies to straightforward questions that have right or wrong answers, like guesstimating a number.
• Crowd wisdom normally doesn’t apply to sophisticated problems requiring methodical solutions, such as scientific research or technological innovation.
• Therefore, to deal with complexity, you need to invoke trusted expertise, not crowds who may or may not know what they’re talking about.

Second, crowd wisdom only emerges from honest and diverse viewpoints. It doesn’t emerge when there’s a dishonest or disproportionate influence from any one person.

• For instance, bad actors may wish to hog the limelight by monopolizing crowd attention, possibly by making outrageous and extreme statements.
• When bad actors use this sort of lopsided manipulation to influence crowds, they can amplify an unsavory amount of outrageous and extreme points of view.
• When amplified among crowds, outrage and extremism can easily overshadow honest, diverse viewpoints needed for crowd wisdom.

When NOT to trust digital crowds: social media posts

For these reasons, it is not necessarily a good idea to trust digital crowds when it comes to posts on social media. That’s because posting on social media tends to be prone to (1) oversimplifying  complex problems and (2) hindering honest and diverse viewpoints by amplifying outrageous, extreme views online.

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To recap, let’s put forward a philosophical rule of thumb about when—and when not—to trust digital crowds:

In general—or at least in theory—it’s not unreasonable to trust digital crowds for online reviews or ratings of products, services, and businesses.

For statistic reasons, these ratings and reviews can serve as reliable guesstimates, assuming they come from honest, diverse points of view that are providing clear answers to simple questions.

At the same time, it’s not necessarily a good idea to trust digital crowds on social media.

By amplifying outrageous and extreme views online, social media platforms tend to oversimplify complex problems and hinder more honest, diverse viewpoints needed for crowd wisdom.

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Recommended reading

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay