Cassowary Crossing

JELLY BEAN PRINCIPLE
(Monkeys, markets, and Hollywood turkeys help us see how clever we collectively are)

(c) David Astle

[Source book: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Suroweicki (Little, Brown 2004) 295pp]

Imagine you lose your monkey somewhere between Sydney and Byron Bay. You’re heading up Highway 1, thinking your darling capuchin is safe in his rooftop basket, but reach the cape to find the rack is bare. It’s a body blow. The kids are in tears, and Find-A-Chimp isn’t listed in the yellow pages.

According to James Surowiecki, a business writer at the New Yorker, the best way to find poor Elmore – who’s registered, desexed and very lost – is to enlist a crowd. Not rubbernecks, or roadside volunteers, but thinkers. A diverse group of problem-solvers who can demystify the eastern seaboard in a unified swoop, locating your monkey by nightfall.

The group’s diversity is important. In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, Suroweicki notes how a team of like-experts – say monkey lovers – is prone to exploit a single vein of knowledge, while a wider sampling of intelligent people are more given to exploring ideas. As he puts it, a crowd is ‘holding a nearly complete picture of the world in its collective brain’. With a wider picture, a crowd has more scope to imagine what the future (or monkey location) may be.

Rather than a capuchin, Suroweicki cites a submarine as his example of a misplaced object, the USS Scorpion vanishing somewhere between Spain and Rhode Island in 1968. Locating the vessel felt like a lottery. Until a naval officer called Craven assembled a group of thinkers – from oceanographers to mathematicians – to set them a puzzle. If you had to draw an X in the sea, where would it be? Importantly, all the elements of effective group dynamics were in place:

Diversity – no member of the group shared the same string of letters after their name, and therefore carried a healthy store of ‘private information’;
Decentralisation – no wild-eyed admiral ruled the meeting with that top-down tyranny of some workplaces we might know;
Independence – your thoughts mattered as much as the next sub-hunter’s;
Aggregation – some means existed for everyone’s smart guess to be melded into a smarter one.

Aggregation lies at the heart of Suroweicki’s book. It’s a $10-word for sharing. When a Year 9 class guesses how many jelly beans are in a jar, the true answer often lies within the range of estimates, the extremes going to cancel themselves out. A simple example but it holds a golden principle. Whether it’s jelly beans or market strategy, most of us are guilty of ‘chasing the expert’, relying too much on the verdict of the few, and ignoring the resources of the many. In quiz parlance, phone-a-friend is more likely to be a lifeline wasted than ask-the-audience, purely because one expert seldom knows more than a crowd.

Let’s get back to that sub-committee. The key to finding the Scorpion was not consensus. Consensus is the way of group-think, that dangerous trend that makes every broker on the floor fall in love with dot-com shares, or biotech options. Group-think leads to bubbles – and crashes. ‘The problem is that once everyone starts piggybacking on the wisdom of the group, then no one is doing anything to add to the wisdom of the group.’

Economist John Keynes likens stock markets to a beauty contest – with a twist. Instead of choosing the prettiest gal (read share) from a pageant of a hundred faces, a trader is trying to choose the gal that everyone else will think pretty. Riskily, such a practice encourages individuals to dwell too much on the impressions of the crowd and less on their own personal compass.

Yet Wall Street, or jelly-bean classes, are not only groups that exist. The term ‘crowd’ can apply to meetings, schools, companies, commuters, investors, voters, cabinets, trivia teams, book clubs, juries and intelligence agencies. If a quandary is shared by a wide circle of people – such as shampoo brands or TV shows or Cox Plate quinellas – then that circle becomes a unity by definition.

Ideally, as members of a crowd, we make individual choices, the outcome reflecting a collective wisdom. This is the essence of why Gigli nose-dived, and Google, or that Thai place opposite the flower shop, flourishes. Ongoing feedback, known as an ‘information cascade’, is crucial to the bettering of wisdom.

So where was the Scorpion? Officer Craven put up bottles of brandy for the smarter stabs. In most scenarios, the notion of reward counts, if only to heighten individual endeavour within the cohesive whole. Despite being social creatures, much like capuchins, humans cannot always be relied upon to exhibit ‘prosocial behaviour’. Self-interest is the nature of the beast. In other words, those 837 jelly beans (or profit, or recognition, or a better health care system for your diabetic son, or CSI:Miami) ultimately matter to most human beans.

Wise crowds can tackle cognition problems (where’s the sub?), coordination problems (negotiating motorways or footpaths) and cooperation problems (taxes and anti-litter campaigns). If I offered you $30, on the condition that I could keep $70 (a windfall for both of us) would you accept the deal? Clinical trials suggest no, even though your own self-interest would be served. Wise crowds loathe unfairness. Overpaid CEOs make our blood boil, as one. This inbuilt itch for parity safeguards our social fabric.

Believe it or not, capuchin monkeys love cucumbers. Scientists toyed with a troop of such monkeys, rewarding the creatures with a cucumber chunk every time a pebble was fetched from a stream. The social fabric was fine until one lucky monkey got a grape for his efforts, the capuchin food of choice, and chaos erupted. Unwarranted reward would not be tolerated. As humans we aren’t so different. The concept is called recipricocity, or I’ll have what she’s having.

Where we may stomach such perceived disparity – such as the 30/70 split of the Ultimatum Game I mentioned – is when the dominant party has proven his or her worth in a given field. An expert, in other words. As Suroweicki is quick to point out, his book is not a raspberry aimed at consultants, but a hymn to diversity. In a follow-up interview the author says, ‘If a group is smart enough to find a real expert, it’s more than smart enough not to need one.’

Anyhow, they found the submarine. Officer Craven took his team’s individual guesses and crunched them into a collective estimate. While no member of the group pinpointed the stricken vessel, the derived X was only 200 metres from the actual wreck. The Scorpion was found thanks to group dynamics and a box of Chivas Regal.

Back in 1841, group dynamics wasn’t a going phrase. In his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay doubted that wisdom could be distilled from the masses. ‘Anyone taken as an individual,’ wrote McKay, ‘is tolerably sensible and reasonable; as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.’

When the conditions are wrong, Suroweicki is the first to agree. A crowd can easily lapse into a mob, or a swarm of blind mice such as the NASA committee of 2003. A teleconference, chaired by Mission Manager Linda Ham, failed to see the foam debris that had led to the crash of the Columbia space shuttle. The group missed the truth because they launched their inquiry with false assumptions and a fear of dissent. The desire for consensus deprived the team the rights of debate, diversity and minority opinion. According to Suroweicki, the group never voted. They never pooled ideas. Under such conditions, madness will trump wisdom every time.

So where is your capuchin? If the Scorpion could be found in a North Atlantic trench, then pinpointing a primate in the semi-tropics should be a picnic. In the spirit of Suroweicki, we summoned zookeepers, senior constables, tour guides and Dexter the Robot to a think tank. We decentralized and aggregated. We cascaded and summarized. The collective insight is clear. Have you checked the Big Banana in Coffs?

[Sunday Life, August 2004]