Too many chefs: Smaller groups exhibit more accurate decision-making

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-04/pu-tmc042314.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 23-Apr-2014

Contact: Morgan Kelly
Princeton University

Too many chefs: Smaller groups exhibit more accurate decision-making

The trope that the likelihood of an accurate group decision increases with the abundance of brains involved might not hold up when a collective faces a variety of factors — as often happens in life and nature. Instead, Princeton University researchers report that smaller groups actually tend to make more accurate decisions while larger assemblies may become excessively focused on only certain pieces of information.

The findings present a significant caveat to what is known about collective intelligence, or the "wisdom of crowds," wherein individual observations — even if imperfect — coalesces into a single, accurate group decision.

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But collective decision-making has rarely been tested under complex, "realistic" circumstances where information comes from multiple sources, the Princeton researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In these scenarios, crowd wisdom peaks early then becomes less accurate as more individuals become involved, explained senior author Iain Couzin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

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