Data from: "The impact of wrong social information on collective wisdom in human groups"

Experimental data from: "The impact of wrong social information on collective wisdom in human groups",with authors:Bertrand Jayles, Ramón Escobedo, Stéphane Cezera, Adrien Blanchet, Tatsuya Kameda, Clément Sire and Guy Theraulaz.AbstractA major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions. We performed experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities twice, before and after receiving some social information. Unbeknownst to the participants, we controlled the degree of inaccuracy of the social information through “virtual influencers” that provided some incorrect information. We find that incorrect social information does not necessarily impair the collective wisdom of groups and can even help a group perform better when it overestimates the true value, by partly compensating a human underestimation bias. Moreover, we find that a large proportion of individuals resist social information by only partially following it, thus improving individual and collective accuracy over a large range of incorrect information.There is only one datafile:wrong-social-info.csvStructure of the file:(soon)