Enhancing the Wisdom of the Crowd With Cognitive-Process Diversity: The Benefits of Aggregating Intuitive and Analytical Judgments

Author(s)

Steffen Keck, Wenjie Tang

Abstract

Drawing on dual-process theory, we suggest that the benefits that arise from combining several quantitative individual judgments will be heightened when these judgments are based on different cognitive processes. We tested this hypothesis in three experimental studies in which participants provided estimates for the dates of different historical events (Study 1, N = 152), made probabilistic forecasts for the outcomes of soccer games (Study 2, N = 98), and estimated the weight of individuals on the basis of a photograph (Study 3, N = 3,695). For each of these tasks, participants were prompted to make judgments relying on an analytical process, on their intuition, or (in a control condition) on no specific instructions. Across all three studies, our results show that an aggregation of intuitive and analytical judgments provides more accurate estimates than any other aggregation procedure and that this advantage increases with the number of aggregated judgments.

Organisation(s)

Department of Accounting, Innovation and Strategy

External organisation(s)

National University of Singapore (NUS)

Journal

Psychological Science

Volume

31

Pages

1272-1282

No. of pages

11

ISSN

0956-7976

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620941840

Publication date

10-2020

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

501011 Cognitive psychology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Psychology(all)

Portal url

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/enhancing-the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-with-cognitiveprocess-diversity-the-benefits-of-aggregating-intuitive-and-analytical-judgments(4bc9e8f3-9bef-4e24-b955-518326a5610e).html