The potential for effective reasoning guides children’s preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing
Communication between social learners can make a group collectively “wiser” than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n=360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or “crowdsource” independent judgments from individual advisors. For problems which could be conclusively solved through “demonstrable” analytic or physical reasoning, all ages preferred to consult the group, even compared to a crowd ten times as large — consistent with past research suggesting that groups regularly outperform even their best members for reasoning problems. In contrast, we observed a consistent developmental shift towards crowdsourcing independent judgments when reasoning by itself was insufficient to conclusively answer a question. Results suggest sophisticated intuitions about the nature of social influence and collective intelligence may guide our social learning strategies from early in development.