Patrick Cooney's Weblog

2005-02-13

Read The Wisdom of Crowds yesterday. The basic premise is that a diverse group will arrive at a better average answer to all sorts of problems than the best person in that group. It also highlights the dangers of small and/or homogenous groups for decision making, particularly when they are dominated by some authority figure. I wonder how many people are trying psychology experiments at work based on this?

Which reminds me... of a psychology experiment I took part in as an undergraduate for extra credit. The experimentor was testing a group of about 40 of us for "ESP", judged by our ability to stare at him for 5 minutes and then draw the shape that he was thinking of on a sheet of paper. He would then describe the shape, and see who was close. A couple of people were close, and one person nailed it. We then did something similar with numbers, and again someone got it right. The experimentor was suitably impressed, made some comments to that effect, and then solicited feedback from us on the process and what we thought of ESP in general. The whole experiment took about 25 minutes and we then shuffled out of the room to get back to... doing whatever undergraduate arts students do.

So what was this three card monte of an experiment about? I'm pretty sure the guy was trying to see if anyone was willing to correct him. Statistically it was likely that somebody would guess his shapes and numbers (and I'm sure he had some confederates just in case). But nobody did. Was he onto something, or should he have just tried engineering students instead?

In other news: unexpected web searches bringing people to this web site:

colonel kurtz
ixxys bagels
katz diner

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