Taking a disagreeing perspective improves the accuracy of people's quantitative estimates

Many decisions rest upon people’s ability to make estimates of unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of a crowd of individuals is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when aggregating multiple estimates from the same person and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people’s aggregate estimates. Here, we present the following strategy: combine people’s first estimate with their second estimate made from the perspective of someone they often disagree with. In five pre-registered experiments (N = 6425, with 53,086 estimates) with populations from the US and UK, we find that such a strategy produces accurate estimates (as compared to when people make a second guess, or when second estimates are made from the perspective of someone they often agree with). These results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, is a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments.

众多决策的制定依赖于人们对未知数量的估测能力。在这些判断中，一群个体汇总的估测往往比大多数个体的估测更为精确。令人称奇的是，当从同一人身上汇总多个估测时，类似的原则亦适用，其中一项关键挑战便是识别出能够提升人们汇总估测准确性的策略。在此，我们提出了以下策略：将人们的首次估测与其从通常意见相左的人的视角出发所做的第二次估测相结合。在五项预先注册的实验（N = 6425，共计53,086次估测）中，实验对象来自美国和英国，我们发现这种策略能够产生准确的估测（相较于人们进行第二次猜测，或当第二次估测是从通常意见相合的人的视角出发时）。这些结果表明，尽管分歧通常因其负面影响而被强调，但它是产生准确判断的有力工具。