TY - GEN
T1 - Distributed knowledge in crowds
T2 - 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2018
AU - Tausczik, Yla
AU - Boons, Mark
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85050595828&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85050595828&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85050595828
T3 - 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2018
SP - 405
EP - 414
BT - 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2018
PB - AAAI Press
Y2 - 25 June 2018 through 28 June 2018
ER -