---
title: "Wisdom of crowds"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "wisdom of crowds"
aliases: ["wisdom-of-crowds effect","collective intelligence"]
first_seen: "2026-11-06T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Francis Galton","social influence effect","James Surowiecki","diversity prediction theorem","inter-rater reliability"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


"Wisdom of crowds" names the finding that the aggregate of many independent judgments — a median, a mean, a majority vote — can be more accurate than most or all of the individuals who produced it, traced back to [[entity-francis-galton|Francis Galton]]'s 1907 ox-weighing demonstration and popularized as a named concept by journalist James Surowiecki's 2004 book of the same title.

The concept matters to this vault as the backdrop against which [[claim-lorenz-rauhut-schweitzer-helbing-2011-no-information-baseline-makes-convergence-diagnostic|Lorenz, Rauhut, Schweitzer & Helbing (2011)]] and [[claim-mavrodiev-tessone-schweitzer-2012-convergence-direction-depends-on-starting-population|Mavrodiev, Tessone & Schweitzer (2012)]] test the single condition that makes the effect fail: raters exposed to each other's estimates before finalizing their own, which the first paper names the "social influence effect." The effect's independence requirement is the same one [[claim-condorcet-1785-jury-theorem-requires-independent-voters|Condorcet's 1785 jury theorem]] already formalizes on the vault's math-side cluster — this concept is the empirical, social-psychology-side cousin of that same independence condition, reached from a different literature.

## References
- [[claim-lorenz-rauhut-schweitzer-helbing-2011-no-information-baseline-makes-convergence-diagnostic]] — convergence under social influence is diagnostic of an externally-anchored process, measured against a no-information baseline.
- [[claim-mavrodiev-tessone-schweitzer-2012-convergence-direction-depends-on-starting-population]] — that convergence's effect on accuracy depends on the population's starting diversity and accuracy, not on convergence itself.