The Crowd Within
Two heads are better than one. Ask the audience is a helpful lifeline on the TV show Millionaire. And tapping into your own creative thinking by revisiting problems later works too. Here's an extract from an interesting article I read in The Economist, 'The Crowd Within'.
My take away? Keep talking to yourself. Continue being curious.
That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question... and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki... Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.
That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess they can. Ask them to make a second guess and it should, by definition, be less accurate. ..Yet Edward Vul and Harold Pashler have revealed in a study just published in the Psychological Science that they average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.
The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the CIA World Factbook... Half of the participants were unexpectedly asked to made a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.
Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.
My take away? Keep talking to yourself. Continue being curious.
That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question... and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki... Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.
That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess they can. Ask them to make a second guess and it should, by definition, be less accurate. ..Yet Edward Vul and Harold Pashler have revealed in a study just published in the Psychological Science that they average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.
The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the CIA World Factbook... Half of the participants were unexpectedly asked to made a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.
Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.
posted by pip @ 2:59 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home