The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

Surowiecki opens the book with the story of Francis Galton at a 1906 livestock fair, where a crowd of hundreds tried to guess the weight of an ox. Although Galton believed that ordinary people were mediocre and that only the “superior” few could make wise judgments, the average of nearly 800 guesses came within a single pound of the ox’s actual weight. This paradox—a crowd of “average” individuals proving collectively more accurate than any expert—frames Surowiecki’s central idea: that groups can, under the right conditions, make better decisions than the smartest person in the room.

The Introduction closes with the 1968 case of the missing US submarine Scorpion. Naval officer John Craven gathered mathematicians, submarine experts, and salvage workers, asking each to guess the submarine’s location. While no single person identified the correct spot, the average of their guesses pinpointed the wreck within 220 yards.

Chapter 1 discusses how groups can arrive at more accurate conclusions than individual experts when they are tackling cognition problems—problems with finite solutions.

The chapter opens with a story about the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? In this game show, contestants must answer a series of increasingly difficult multiple-choice questions.