Wisdom of Crowds

Increasingly, crowds are being used to both detect and moderate misinformation. Several of our research projects are focused on how to best use crowds to do this.

Optimising  Crowd Performance

A number of our studies have focused on optimising the performance of the crowd or tested how well crowds perform.

• Howe, P.D.L., Martinie, M., Wilkening, T. (2024). Using cross-domain expertise to aggregate judgments when within-domain expertise is unknown. Decision, 11(1), 35-59. [PDF]
• Grossman, I., Rotella, A., Hutcherson, C.,…Wilkening, T. (2023). Insights into accuracy of social scientists’ forecasts of societal change. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(4), 484-501. [PDF]
• Wilkening, T, Martinie, M, Howe, PDL (2022). Hidden experts in the crowd: Using meta-predictions to leverage expertise in single question prediction problems. Management Science. 68(1), 487-508. [PDF]
• Martinie, M, Wilkening, T, & Howe, PDL (2020). Using meta-predictions to identify experts in the crowd when past performance is unknown. PLOS ONE, 15(4), e0232058. [PDF]

Crowdsourcing Predictions

A major point of this work is to use crowds to make genuinely useful predictions. An example of where we have done that, in the context of misinformation best practice, is below.

• Kruger, A, Saletta, M, Ahmad, A, Howe, P (2024) Structured expert elicitation on disinformation, misinformation, and malign influence: Barriers, strategies, and opportunities. Harvard Kennedy School of Misinformation Review. [PDF]

Normative Influence

Crowds don't just make good predictions, they are also very good at influencing behaviour - a phenomenon known as normative influence. Below is some of our ground-breaking work testing various theories of normative influence and here is a commentary about our work.

• Pryor, C, Perfors, A & Howe, PDL (2019). Even arbitrary norms influence moral decision-making. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(1), 57. [PDF]