Abstract
Drawing on dual process theory, we suggest that the benefits that arise from combining different individual judgments will be heightened when these judgments are based on different cognitive processes. We test this hypothesis in two experimental studies in which participants were prompted to make judgments relying on an analytical process, on their intuition, or in a control condition in which no particular instructions were given. Our results show that an aggregation of intuitive and analytical judgments provides more accurate estimates than any other aggregation procedure, and that this advantage increases with the number of judgments that are aggregated. Moreover, we find evidence that this result is driven by a lower correlation between errors of intuitive and analytical judgments compared to errors of judgments that are based on the same cognitive process or judgment errors in the control condition.
Highlights
As first noted by Galton (1907), a statistical combination of quantitative judgments made by multiple judges is typically more accurate than the judgment of a randomly selected individual judge
Building on dual-process theory (e.g., Kahneman, 2011; Sloman, 1996), we argue that forming a crowd with a high level of cognitive-process diversity will be more beneficial than combining judgments based on the same cognitive process
The results of three experimental studies showed that forming crowds with a high level of cognitive-process diversity—by aggregating a combination of intuitive and analytical individual judgments—improved the quality of crowd wisdom, compared with crowds formed by an aggregation of only analytical judgments, only intuitive judgments, or judgments made in a control condition without specific manipulation of judges’ cognitive processes
Summary
As first noted by Galton (1907), a statistical combination of quantitative judgments made by multiple judges is typically more accurate than the judgment of a randomly selected individual judge. When errors are systematically correlated—that is, when judges collectively either under- or overestimate the true value— bracketing will occur only rarely, and judgment aggregation loses most of its benefits To address this problem of correlated errors, we propose heightening the level of independence between individual judgments by manipulating the cognitive process that individuals use to form their judgments. The literature suggests that there is no universal advantage of one cognitive process over another (e.g., Plessner & Czenna, 2008) Instead, because they draw on different sources of information and decision rules to form a judgment, each process is likely to have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Judgments will be more likely to be based on complex (vs. simple) rules than intuitive judgments are
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