Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

For example, if one polls a group of experts about their predictions, their aggregate knowledge tends to be more accurate than that of any one of them. The Internet search engine, Google, works well because its logic builds in the collective information of people who search the Internet, weighting results toward the most frequently linked sites. At its best, the wisdom of the crowd finds success in democracy. It is not that people always reach the best decision through politics but that democracy is the wisest decision-making process for a society. Surowiecki tempers his enthusiasm, however, with two preconditions for good collective decision making: People must have diverse views, and they have to reach their decisions independently of one another. Absent these conditions, an efficient stock market, for instance, can generate a bubble of excessive speculation, like the dot-com era of the 1990s. A bubble arises when many investors start making decisions based on what they think others are going to do, instead of paying attention to business fundamentals, leading to herd behavior.

So which author better describes the collective nature of humanity? Their two descriptions represent extremes of collective behavior. The perspective of this book is the middle ground and a more balanced view of the good and evil in collective behavior and decision making. In contrast to Mackay and Surowiecki, the attention here is not so much on extraordinary events or ideal situations but how social conformity affects the ordinary, everyday dimension of social life and politics. Although one might construct a good decision-making process to deal with a specific problem, making the best of people’s collective wisdom, this rarely happens in ordinary life. Too often, the condition of independent decision making is absent. This throws collective decisions into the camp of social conformity and herd mentality. Even in situations where people have accurate information, social conformity can lead to unexpected results in collective behavior.