Promoting Erroneous Divergent Opinions Increases the Wisdom of Crowds
研究发现，通过将群体分成两部分并分别锚定在高低两个极端值上，可以增加意见多样性，从而降低集体估计误差，提升群体智慧。
The aggregation of many lay judgments generates surprisingly accurate estimates. This phenomenon, called the “wisdom of crowds,” has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision-making and financial forecasting. Previous research identified two factors driving this effect: the accuracy of individual assessments and the diversity of opinions. Most available strategies to enhance the wisdom of crowds have focused on improving individual accuracy while neglecting the potential of increasing opinion diversity. Here, we study a complementary approach to reduce collective error by promoting erroneous divergent opinions. This strategy proposes to anchor half of the crowd to a small value and the other half to a large value before eliciting and averaging all estimates. Consistent with our mathematical modeling, four experiments ( N = 1,362 adults) demonstrated that this method is effective for estimation and forecasting tasks. Beyond the practical implications, these findings offer new theoretical insights into the epistemic value of collective decision-making.