Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
Previous studies have shown that a single person can exploit “wisdom of crowds” by her/himself. This is achieved by aggregating multiple “quasi-independent” estimates from the same person. However, previous methods proposed were not necessarily efficient to utilize. Therefore, we propose a new efficient method for exploiting the wisdom of crowds in one mind, based on perspective-taking.Two behavioral experiments revealed that our method effectively induced the wisdom of crowds by a single individual. More importantly, participants in our method made estimations more quickly compared to those utilizing a previously described method, suggesting that our method required a relatively diminished cognitive load for participants. Further investigation suggested that our method was relatively immune to adverse effects of confidence toward problem solving. Therefore, the present findings show that our method could be effective and efficient method for inducing the wisdom of crowds in one mind.
