The impact of incorrect social information on collective wisdom in human groups

Bertrand Jayles, Ramon Escobedo, Stéphane Cezera, Adrien Blanchet, Tatsuya Kameda, Clément Sire and Guy Théraulaz

No 1101, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: A major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions. We performed experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities before and after receiving social information. Unbeknownst to them, we controlled the degree of inaccuracy of the social information through "virtual influencers", who provided some incorrect information. We find that a large proportion of individuals only partially follow the social information, thus resisting incorrect information. Moreover, we find that incorrect social information can help a group perform better when it overestimates the true value, by partly compensating a human underestimation bias. Overall, our results suggest that incorrect information does not necessarily impair the collective wisdom of groups, and can even be used to dampen the negative effects of known cognitive biases.

Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docu ... 2020/wp_tse_1101.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The impact of incorrect social information on collective wisdom in human groups (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:wpaper:124257

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().