Crowdsourcing – the idea that if you get enough people together all sorts of behavioural flocking algorithms come into play that make wonderful things just happen all by themselves. It’s so easy! The “wisdom of crowds” has been experimented with to create works of collaborative art and predict everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters – never, to my knowledge, with anything but mediocre results on the creative side, and statistically sub par results on the predictive side.
In other words, crowdsourcing doesn’t actually work. File it away with “ideas are the new currency”, “The internet will eliminate national, economic and gender boundaries” and “Reality is software that can be hacked”. Crowdsourcing produces exactly what you’d expect to get from the averaged input of many hands, and nothing more. Now a new study released by cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone demonstrates how large groups tend to dampen innovation and creativity, because of an inevitable tendency in crowds to flock to popular ideas at the expense of better ones. Smaller groups on the other hand, tend to do better at encouraging innovation – which has been anecdotal knowledge for millenia. So if you were wondering if the range of stories at sites like Digg has been getting narrower and narrower over the years, it’s not just your imagination – science says!
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