During a conversation with Denis Dutton (of the always good Arts and Letters Daily) he pointed me to a fascinating article about the formation of the current paradigm that surrounds popular thinking on diets and heart disease. There’s a great extract which gets to the heart of the matter (excuse the pun – which you’ll understand if you read the article) :
We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at βWho Wants to Be a Millionaireβ usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.
If the second person isnβt sure of the answer, heβs liable to go along with the first personβs guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, sheβs more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an βinformational cascadeβ as one person after another assumes that the rest canβt all be wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.
So what does this lead to?
The informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.
What “popular wisdom” will you question today?
This reminds me of a story I read once about how a lecture hall full of (non pilot) people were able to fly a fully functioning airline flight simulator using the combined and averaged inputs from their laptop interfaces. However, they struggled on an individual basis.
Is this why fish swim in schools and humans generally don’t live alone in caves on mountain tops? Being part of a society confers benefits whereas individualists get picked off by the sharks and wolves?
On the other hand, a recent study suggests that most billionaires started out as social outcasts, overcame their challenges and did well by NOT following mainstream thinking. Go figure.