The myopia of crowds: Cognitive load and collective evaluation of answers on Stack Exchange

PLoS One

Keith Burghardt¹  William Rand²  Emanuel F. Alsina³  Kristina Lerman⁴  Michelle Girvan⁵ 

[1] Dept of Computer Science, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, United States of America;Dept of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States of America;Dept of Political Science, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, United States of America;Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, United States of America;University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena MO, Italy

关键词: Social influence;    Behavior;    Mathematical models;    Cognitive heuristics;    Decision making;    Cognitive psychology;    Cognition;    Data mining;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0173610

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Crowds can often make better decisions than individuals or small groups of experts by leveraging their ability to aggregate diverse information. Question answering sites, such as Stack Exchange, rely on the “wisdom of crowds” effect to identify the best answers to questions asked by users. We analyze data from 250 communities on the Stack Exchange network to pinpoint factors affecting which answers are chosen as the best answers. Our results suggest that, rather than evaluate all available answers to a question, users rely on simple cognitive heuristics to choose an answer to vote for or accept. These cognitive heuristics are linked to an answer’s salience, such as the order in which it is listed and how much screen space it occupies. While askers appear to depend on heuristics to a greater extent than voters when choosing an answer to accept as the most helpful one, voters use acceptance itself as a heuristic, and they are more likely to choose the answer after it has been accepted than before that answer was accepted. These heuristics become more important in explaining and predicting behavior as the number of available answers to a question increases. Our findings suggest that crowd judgments may become less reliable as the number of answers grows.

【 授权许可】

CC BY