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“Thetypesofproblemswegivethemare
quitediverse,”vanGeldersays.“Itmightbe
acounterterrorismprobleminafictional
Asiancountry,orassessingtheprobability
thatanenemyisbuildinganewkindof
weapon. They’re what we call ‘constrained
problems’, so only good reasoning matters.
No outside knowledge is necessary.”
SWARM scores these reports based on strict
criteria:thecogencyoftheirarguments,
theirapplicationoflogic,anduseofcreative
problem-solving, among others. They then
compare the crowdsourced reports against
those produced by professional intelligence
analysts.Theresultshavebeenstaggering.
“The groups produce much, much better
reasoning[than the experts],” van Gelder
says.“Somethingakinto‘superreasoning’.
Wehavebeensurprisedatthesizeofthe
dierence. It’s very exciting.”
This research may prove useful in the fight
againstterrorism.ButtheworkSWARM
isdoinghasthepotentialformuchbroader
application–andit’shelpingtochange
ourunderstandingaboutwhathappens
tohumanthinkingwhenweformlarge
groups. Ever since Charles Mackay published
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
MadnessofCrowdsin 1841, most researchers
haveagreedthatgroupthinkingis–basically
–bad.Ifyou’retryingtogeneratelogic,
rationalityandgoodsense,thethinkingwent,
don’tjoinateam.GustaveLeBon,writing
inthelate19thcentury, theorised that crowds
actratherlikeadisease:ideasspreadand
multiply, overwhelming the individual’s
capacityforself-reflectivethinkingabout
presidential election to the 2003 Columbia
space shuttle disaster.Which presents us with a conundrum:
groups may hold the key to ‘super reasoning’,
but if left unchecked, they can become a
breeding ground for prejudice, emotional
instability, sloppy logic and irrational
behaviour – pretty much the opposite
of what IARPA is going for.Lately, though, the consensus on crowds has
begun to shift. In 2004, journalist James
Surowiecki wrote a book called The Wisdom
of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than
the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes
Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.
Surowiecki wrote that group thinking could
often be a cause for good. Collective reasoning,
for example, is essentially how traders value
companies on the stock market, and how
pedestrians fl ow along a crowded pavement
uninterrupted without ever speaking a word.
Of course, both markets and pedestrians fail
from time to time. But more often than not,
they work exceedingly well.So, what separates an unruly mob from a
smart group? Surowiecki determined that
there are four factors. For a group to work
well it must hold a diversity of opinions; its
members must be independent from one
another; it must be decentralised (meaning
people are able to specialise and draw on local
knowledge); and it must be aggregated (some
impartial mechanism must pull the group’s
random ideas together). If all those safeguards
are in place, you can turn a crowd of average
Joes into what has been termed a ‘singular
emergent entity’ – a sort of unifi ed collective
intelligence. A human swarm, basically.......................................
IMAGINE A FORUM WHERE AVERAGE
PEOPLE COULD CROWDSOURCE
SOLUTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE, OR
COME UP WITH MORE EFFICIENT HEALTH
CARE. PERHAPS MAKE BETTER HONEY.
whether those ideas are good or bad.
“The masses have never thirsted after
truth,” he wrote. “The power of crowds
is only to destroy.”History has more or less proved Le Bon
right: in the 1970s, psychologists including
Philip Zimbardo, of the morally sketchy
Stanford Prison Experiment, helped
establish ideas such as Deindividualisation
Theory – the notion that group anonymity
and peer pressure can weaken personal
controls, minimising guilt or self-restraint.
In other words, we tend to act worse when
there are more of us around. Since then,
the consensus has been that groups are
dangerous. After all, no-one has ever used
the phrase ‘mob mentality’ in a positive
way (except, perhaps, the leaders of mobs).Modern research has tended to bear this
thinking out, identifying many biases that
occur in large groups but not in individuals.
You can fi nd most of them on your average
Facebook feed. There’s ‘groupthink’ (irrational
decision-making that occurs in groups that
lack diversity), the ‘halo e ect’ (where people
in a group uncritically accept proposals from
someone with charisma and good hair), and
‘information cascades’ (where people make
choices based on the observed choices of
others, rather than their own knowledge).
Indeed, groupthink has been blamed for
everything from the outcome of the 2016 U.S.