Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar

Different people know different things, and good answers and predictions to challenging problems can often benefit from combining human knowledge. In a wide array of military, political, social and other domains, an effect known as the  'Wisdom of Crowds' has been demonstrated, in which the aggregate answer across a group of people is more accurate than the answer of any individual in the group.  In this talk, we explore the effectiveness of a number of ways of combining human knowledge. We are especially interested in research questions that extend standard Wisdom the Crowd analyses by using cognitive models of decision-making.  One question is how structured and multidimensional human knowledge should be combined. Another question is how experts can be identified among crowds. A final question is how human knowledge should be combined if only a few people, and not a crowd, are available.