A battle of ideas is going on inside your mind. Reprinted from
the Jun 26th 2008 edition of the Economist. THAT problem solving
becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more
than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that.
Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are
there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers.
Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if
just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair,
and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon
was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a
columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a
pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They
have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at
different times are also better than one. That is strange. Until
now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess,
they make the most accurate guess that they can. Ask them to
make a second and it sh