About ten years ago, a friend told me about a popular best- selling book titled “Wisdom of the Crowd” by James Suroweicki.
It has many case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument in several fields in economics and human behavior.
The first anecdote is about how a crowd at a country fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox. Their individual guesses were not accurate, but when the average of their guesses was calculated, it was quite close to the actual weight of the ox.
This is the outcome of independent decisions made by many persons and is not the same as crowd psychology (where all the members of the crowd adopt the same response).
I have not read the actual book. However, I found this concept to be fascinating.
I have a statistical background and I like to test if “the wisdom of the crowd” can produce better public policies.