The wisdom of crowd is the process of considering the group opinion as a better answer for a question compared to only one’s opinion. It includes the answers of estimating quantity, general knowledge and also spatial reasoning. In the book titled The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, James Surowiecki wrote about a lot of different case studies and also anecdotes about this wisdom of the crowd.

One of the case studies is about a statistician Francis Galton who found out that the crowd in Plymouth could guess the exact weight of an ox while each individual and cattle expert couldn’t. He did it by finding the mean of all 800 guesses, which was 1197 pounds, was even closer to the real weight which is 1198 pounds.

The definition of the crowd itself is any group of people even if the group is not cohesive for example a corporation, a group of researches and also general public. For example, when they are asked to predict on which horse will win in a race, the members of the group do not have to know each others’ prediction.

The application of the effects of the wisdom of crowd fall into 3 categories, those are prediction markets, Delphi methods and the traditional opinion poll extensions. The prediction market is a speculative or betting market made to make verifiable predictions. The results of this method are the current market prices. The Delphi method is the way in which a final prediction is obtained by asking a panel of independent experts. These experts are also given chances to revise their earlier opinion after they listen to others’ opinions and this process finally moves toward a single ‘correct’ prediction.

There are some benefits of this theory application. Surowiecki showed that the public and internal corporate markets’ success is the evidence that a group of people with different points of view (but the same motivation especially to make the best guess) will be able to make accurate prediction. He also gives another example that is his publisher who can make better results by assigning a lot of individual authors compared to a team with smaller number of members.

The theory of Wisdom of Crowds was then also proved to work as claimed by the illusionist Derren Brown. He could accurately predict the UK National Lottery results in September 2009. He guessed the numbers to be -2, 11, 23, 28, 35 and 39-, and those were the exact numbers drawn from the lottery machine. When he was asked how he could do it, he said he only asked a group of 24 people using the unconscious ‘automatic writing’.

He previously asked that group of people to free their minds from any thought of winning and then they had to write down the numbers of the six lottery balls. He admitted that he only added up all the numbers for each ball and then divided them by 24. Although there have been a lot of criticism to the concept, there’s always a possibility that this concept may be true.