Gabriel Madirolas and Gonzalo De Polavieja at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain, say they found a way to analyze the answers from a crowd that allows them to remove (groupthink) bias and so settle on a wiser answer. The theory behind their work is straightforward. Their idea is that some people are more strongly influenced by additional information than others who are confident in their own opinion. So identifying these more strongly influenced people and separating them from the independent thinkers creates two different groups. The group of independent thinkers is then more likely to give a wise estimate. Or put another way, ignore the wisdom of the crowd in favor of the wisdom of the confident.
Read the full piece at MIT Technology Review
