In 1907, statistician Francis Galton observed something strange at a county fair: Attendees were participating in a game where they guessed the weight of an ox, with the closest answer to the truth winning a prize. To Galton’s surprise, while the guesses of the individual attendees varied wildly, the average of the crowd’s guesses was just one pound away from the true weight of the ox—closer than the closest individual’s.
The name for this phenomenon, in which individual, noisy judgments can be aggregated together to produce remarkably accurate results, was coined by journalist James Surowiecki as the “wisdom of crowds.”
And in it lies one possible answer to a thorny issue: how to combat misinformation on Facebook.
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Source: How the Wisdom of Crowds Could Fight Facebook’s Fact-Checking Problem | Time