Lita Sorensen - Mob Rule or the Wisdom of the Crowd?

Mob Rule or the Wisdom of the Crowd?

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Published in 2020 by Greenhaven Publishing, LLC

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Copyright 2020 by Greenhaven Publishing, LLC

First Edition

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Articles in Greenhaven Publishing anthologies are often edited for length to meet page requirements. In addition, original titles of these works are changed to clearly present the main thesis and to explicitly indicate the authors opinion. Every effort is made to ensure that Greenhaven Publishing accurately reflects the original intent of the authors. Every effort has been made to trace the owners of the copyrighted material.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sorensen, Lita, editor.

Title: Mob rule or the wisdom of the crowd? / Lita Sorensen, book editor.

Description: First edition. | New York: Greenhaven Publishing, 2020 | Series: At issue | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Grades 912. Identifiers: LCCN 2019022600 | ISBN 9781534506381 (library binding) | ISBN 9781534506374 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Group decision making. | Crowdsourcing.

Classification: LCC HM746 .M63 2020 | DDC 658.4/036dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022600

Manufactured in the United States of America

Website: http://greenhavenpublishing.com

Contents

Graham Kendall

Will Hutton

Floyd Henry Allport

Talal Al-Khatib

Julie Simon

Lee Jussim

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Stefaan Verhulst

Louis Rosenberg

MIT Sloan School of Management

Claire Potter

Bill Schneider

Michael Haupt

Peter Dizikes

Nick Beim

Phil McKinney

Introduction

A n ancient Chinese proverb has it that Three stupid shoemakers know more than the wisest man.

The statement can be said to be an argument for the idea of democracy itself, where the wisdom of a crowd, or collective society, can quite often be found to be sounder than the knowledgeable decisions of elites. Its also an old idea, spanning as far back in time to Aristotle and is mentioned in his Politics. The idea of mob rule, the negative counterpart to the positive wisdom of the collective, has ancient roots as well and was first referenced by Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenic period. He defined it as the pathological version of democracy, where legitimate authorities are intimidated or silenced by a mob or a fickle crowd. In the Hebrew Talmud, mentions of the Greek word ochlos, referring to mobs or crowds of any kind as pertaining to the rule of law, abound.

It is truly an old dichotomy, as old as conceptions of human law, philosophy, and even decision making. And yet the ideas are as prescient today as they have ever been. With the rise of modern and increasingly more open and democratic societies and the invention of the internet, a resurgence of interest in these two dichotomous ways of thinking has been pushed to the forefront.

The Wisdom of the Crowd

In defining the idea of the wisdom of the crowd, the term crowd may take on more than the originally-thought of definition of a crowd. One characterization describes a crowd as a group of people actively being asked to participate in a decision-making process. In modern contexts, crowds are often used in online (internet) applications, but they are also used in real life, or offline, capacities. Sometimes, members of a certain crowd may be paid for their participation, such as in paid surveys or polls. Other times, such as in jury duty in the United States, the wisdom of the crowd is mandated or required and not an individuals personal choice.

The wisdom of the crowd is found in the fact that the aggregate of any large groups answers to any given question involving general knowledge, the estimation of quantities, or spatial reasoning is most often found to be superior or at least as good as that of individuals singled out within the group. This phenomenon may be explained by the cancelation of idiosyncratic noise (certain specifics in the outlook of an individual) associated with each judgment. Thus, taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward balancing or accommodating the effect of this noise, creating a superior judgment.

Mob Rule

The term mob rule has many more connotations associated with governance and social psychology, where it is sometimes synonymous with crowd psychology. Mob rule has a pejorative context. Social psychologists have many developed theories explaining how crowd psychology and behavior differs from that of individuals, and more theories for the way individuals act within a crowd and ways in which they interact with it. Prominent social scientists who have delved into such theories include such people as Gustave Le Bon, a Frenchman best known for his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, written in 1895; Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist; Steve Reicher, a present-day British professor prominent in the field of social identity; as well as Sigmund Freud.

Most studies relate to the behaviors and thought processes of both the single members of crowds and the crowd as an entity. Its been shown that crowd behavior is related to individual loss of responsibility and the mistaken impression of a universality of behavior, both increasing with larger crowd sizes.

At Issue: Mob Rule or Wisdom of the Crowd encompasses differing viewpoint and contextual articles regarding the idea of mob rule and/or the wisdom of crowds. You will find selections outlining the wisdom of the crowd and wise crowds as theories, introducing author James Surowieckis influential 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, and providing some historical context for consideration. Also included is a serious look at crowd psychology or mob rule as originally conceptualized by social scientists, which perhaps stands in critical analysis of the wisdom of crowds, a piece examining what the United States Founding Fathers felt as far as our fledgling democracy and the wisdom of crowds versus the idea of mob rule, and pieces elucidating how diversity, pluralism, and a truly free press are the ultimate expression of the wisdom of crowds.

In addition, we include pieces on adjunct inventions and phenomenon stemming from the study of crowd behavior and the wisdom of crowds. Crowdsourcing seeks to harness the wisdom of crowds to source goods and services and sometimes ideas and finances (crowdfunding) from a large group of participants usually connected by the internet. As a function, it divides the work between individuals to achieve a cumulative result.

Human swarming, or decentralized, self-organizing networks of individuals acting in real time to solve problems is examined, as is the occurrence of information cascades, when the wisdom of the crowd goes terribly wrong and incites herd-like behavior, leading to poor and blatantly wrong, sometimes dangerous choices. Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, which is openly crowdsourced, is introduced as a product of the wisdom of crowds with authors who praise it as well as those who openly criticize it. The Global Brain, a futuristic and neuroscienceinspired vision of a worldwide information and communications technology network that interconnects all people and their technological artifacts is explored, as well as an upgrade to the wisdom of crowds algorithm called Surprisingly Popular.