Using Cognitive Models to Improve the Wisdom of the Crowd

Abstract

The wisdom of the crowd is the finding that aggregating the judgments of many people can lead to surprisingly accurate group judgments. Usually statistical methods are used to aggregate people’s judgments, but there are advantages to using cognitive models instead. Crowd judgments based on cognitive modeling can (a) identify experts and amplify their judgments, (b) provide a representational structure for aggregating complicated multidimensional judgments, (c) debias judgments that are affected by heuristic cognitive processes or competitive social situations, and (d) diversify the crowd by incorporating predictions about judgments that have not been observed. Demonstrations of these advantages are provided in case studies involving ranking, probability estimation, and categorization problems.