The Wisdom of Crowds. James Surowiecki

Abstract

The Wisdom of the Crowds is a book by James Surowiecki, which is at the intersection of social sciences, especially political science, management and economics, and psychology. This book is about the field of political psychology but also draws from the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. In the book, Surowiecki says that the dynamic and the intelligence of a group can exist if it includes differences and diversity, and states that group intelligence is more successful than that of the separate one-by-one individual. He also argues that a group's or a team's wisdom has a dynamic effect independent of whether it results in a positive or negative result in social decision-making processes such as economy and politics. The author bases these arguments on studies and results of the studies carried out by American sociologists and psychologists in the 1920s. For example, Surowiecki tries to strengthen his thought on the wisdom of the crowds by showing a result that the arithmetic average of all the predictions was 0.4 degrees close to the actual temperature value in the temperature