The Psychology of Second Guesses: Implications for the Wisdom of the Inner Crowd

Celia Gaertig () and Joseph P. Simmons ()
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Celia Gaertig: Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637
Joseph P. Simmons: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19148

Management Science, 2021, vol. 67, issue 9, 5921-5942

Abstract: Prior research suggests that averaging two guesses from the same person can improve quantitative judgments, a phenomenon known as the “wisdom of the inner crowd.” In this article, we find that this effect hinges on whether people explicitly decide in which direction their first guess had erred before making their second guess. In nine studies ( N = 8,465), we found that asking people to explicitly indicate whether their first guess was too high or too low before making their second guess made people more likely to provide a second guess that was more extreme (in the same direction) than their first guess. As a consequence, the introduction of that “Too High/Too Low” question reduced (and sometimes eliminated or reversed) the wisdom-of-the-inner-crowd effect for (the majority of) questions with non-extreme correct answers and increased the wisdom-of-the-inner-crowd effect for questions with extreme correct answers. Our findings suggest that the wisdom-of-the-inner-crowd effect is not inevitable but rather that it depends on the processes people use to generate their second guesses.

Keywords: wisdom of crowds; estimation; crowd within; debiasing; intuitive confidence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:67:y:2021:i:9:p:5921-5942

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