# Would a crowd guess better if everyone could see everyone's guess?

- Series: [The Better Guess](https://miu.fm/thebetterguess.md)
- Published: 2026-10-13
- Page: https://miu.fm/thebetterguess/would-a-crowd-guess-better-if-everyone-could-see-everyone-s

## Story

Would a crowd guess better if everyone could see everyone's guess?

In 1907 Francis Galton found that 787 people guessing the weight of an ox were, taken together, almost exactly right. He also noted why: the judgments were "unbiassed by passion and uninfluenced by oratory and the like". Everyone guessed alone.

In 2011 Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer and Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich tested the other way. Students sat in cubicles, twelve at a time, and estimated things like the number of murders registered in Switzerland in 2006 (it was 198), five times in a row, paid for accuracy. Some groups saw each other's guesses between rounds.

In one group the first guesses ran from 17 to 3,000; after five rounds, from 29 to 450, and the middle guess had moved from 150 to 155. Across the groups that saw each other the spread fell by about four fifths, the middle got no reliably closer to the truth, and in 13 of 48 groups (our count from the paper's data) the truth ended up outside all twelve guesses. People also felt a little surer.

A crowd works when its mistakes point in different directions and cancel. Later experiments found that copying can help when the accurate people are the ones copied, which you rarely know in advance.

So: guess first. Then look. What was your answer?

Sources: Lorenz, Rauhut, Schweitzer and Helbing, "How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect", PNAS 108(22), 2011; Francis Galton, "Vox Populi", Nature 75, 1907; Becker, Brackbill and Centola, "Network dynamics of social influence in the wisdom of crowds", PNAS 114(26), 2017.
Sounds: Freesound, CC0 (magnus1906); our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).

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