Could you guess the amount of candies in a jar? Or the density of Switzerland?

We do truly believe in collective intelligence. In fact, we always encourage you to ask your partners, to ask for feedback, and to improve things together.

But, what really is collective intelligence? When was it described for the first time? And how does it work?

Let’s start by describing it. Collective intelligence is when a general knowledge or estimation is, at the end, equal or superior to the estimation made by a single person, even if this person is an expert in the field.

Guessing our collective potential

One of the researchers studying this phenomena has been Andrew King, from the Royal Veterinary College, and his collaborators.

King asked in 2011 to 82 individuals, in isolation, to try to guess how many candies were in a boat. The mean of the estimates of the 82 subjects was 751. Surprisingly, the actual number of candies was 752.

751 candies were the amount estimated by 82 people. There were 752 candies in the jar. 

Later on, King informed different subgroups of these 82 individuals what was the estimates that other colleagues had made. With this information, the intelligence of the collective was affected: the average of estimates went from 882 to 1109. 

In another experiment, Jan Lorenz and his collaborators used 144 Swiss students who, in separate cubicles, were asked with very specific questions, such as: “What is the population density of Switzerland in inhabitants per square meter?”, or “How many new inhabitants has Zurich won?”.

In this case, the average of the estimates was 10.000, and the real value 10.067. Surprising, eh? There are many examples of collective intelligence.

And we have seen how collective intelligence works! Nextinit is based on this principle. Thanks to collective ntelligence, crowdfunding, and gamification companies find out amazing solutions to implement in their activity, with great results. Now, you can try Nextinit for free ;).