The Strengths and Weaknesses of Crowds to Address Global Problems

Abstract

Global climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of misinformation on social media are just a handful of highly consequential problems affecting society. We argue that the rough contours of many societal problems can be framed within a “wisdom of crowds” perspective. Such a framing allows researchers to recast complex problems within a simple conceptual framework and leverage known results on crowd wisdom. To this end, we present a simple “toy” model of the strengths and weaknesses of crowd wisdom that easily maps to many societal problems. Our model treats the judgments of individuals as random draws from a distribution intended to represent a heterogeneous population. We use a weighted mean of these individuals to represent the crowd’s collective judgment. Using this setup, we show that subgroups have the potential to produce substantively different judgments and we investigate their effect on a crowd’s ability to generate accurate judgments about societal problems. We argue that future work on societal problems can benefit from more sophisticated, domain-specific theory and models based on the wisdom of crowds.