The wisdom of crowds for visual search
Abstract
Simple majority voting is a widespread, effective mechanism to exploit the wisdom of crowds. We explored scenarios where, from decision to decision, a varying minority of group members often has increased information relative to the majority of the group. We show how this happens for visual search with large image data and how the resulting pooling benefits are greater than previously thought based on simpler perceptual tasks. Furthermore, we show how simple majority voting obtains inferior benefits for such scenarios relative to averaging people’s confidences. These findings could apply to life-critical medical and geospatial imaging decisions that require searching large data volumes and, more generally, to any decision-making task for which the minority of group members with high expertise varies across decisions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- May 10, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1610732114
Entities
People
- Miguel P. Eckstein
- Mordechai Z. Juni
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- University of California
- University of California, Santa Barbara