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The Wisdom of Trivia Crowds
In the fall of 1906, people across Britain traveled to Plymouth for its annual West England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, a country fair focused on the appraisal of farm animals. In attendance was the statistician Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin as well as the coiner of the phrase “nature versus nurture”. As the 85-year-old strolled past the stalls, he became interested in a competition to guess the weight of a particular ox. Nearly 800 visitors had wagered a guess on its size, and prizes would be awarded to the best estimators.
Galton was astonished when the middlemost guess ended up being a mere 11 pounds less than the true weight of 1,197. (Later analysis actually showed that the mean estimate was exactly 1,197 pounds, but maybe Galton was biased in favor of reporting the middlemost - he did, after all, also coin the term “median”.) His observation inspired interest into a phenomenon that later became known as the wisdom of the crowd. Today you may see it at play in prediction markets or in a contest at your local library to guess the number of gumballs in a jar. Another place to observe its effect? Water Cooler Trivia tiebreaker questions.
Each Water Cooler Trivia quiz ends with a tiebreaker question, which we don’t expect anyone to know the precise answer to. For example:
