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

The Wisdom of Crowds challenges the traditional practice of “chasing the expert,” whereby people turn to authoritative figures in a specific field, seeking their knowledge or wanting them to accurately predict the future. Surowiecki concedes that having a deep understanding of a topic can be incredibly important when solving problems that are local to the expert’s field in question. However, expert individuals are still weak to cognitive biases, overconfidence, and social pressures, amplifying their blind spots. All of these factors prevent them from being consistently reliable in their judgment of topics outside their field or topics that are inherently complex and volatile, such as predicting the future. This is why, statistically speaking, experts are frequently outperformed by the wisdom of crowds. The Bay of Pigs incident, where elite advisors reinforced each other’s mistaken assumptions, exemplifies how narrow expertise without dissent can produce catastrophic blind spots.

Crowds perform better and more accurately than expert individuals when their opinions are aggregated and when they satisfy the three conditions of being diverse, independent, and decentralized. These three factors are precisely what individual experts lack, which causes their blind spots. For example, experts often see patterns based on their training, which can prevent them from exploring alternatives (or, in a worst-case scenario, prevent them from even realizing that there are alternatives).