INSPIRING QUOTES & CREATIVITY SPOTLIGHT

The Two Faces of the Crowd

Give a crowd a simple question say, the weight of an ox. And their collective answer can be remarkably accurate.

Ask that same crowd a moral question say, what makes a woman beautiful. And they might torture children for a thousand years.

The difference between wisdom and madness in groups isn't the people. It's the conditions. Two historical moments show us how.

In 1907, at a county fair in Plymouth, England, Francis Galton watches 787 villagers scribble their guesses to: How much does this ox weigh? The slips pile up with wild overestimates, ridiculous underestimates, and everything in between. Galton calculates the average: 1,197 pounds. Amazingly, the ox weighs 1,198.

The crowd, collectively, was nearly perfect. Galton had stumbled on something profound: aggregate many independent guesses, and errors cancel out. The crowd becomes smarter than any individual within it.

Nearly a century later, author James Surowiecki documented the same pattern across countless studies: while the best individual expert outperforms the average person, the crowd's collective average consistently beats even the best expert.

But crowd wisdom isn't random. The same conditions that produce wisdom, when absent, can produce madness.

Newton discovered this truth at great personal cost. In 1720, the man who'd unlocked the mathematics of the universe lost £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble (approximately $4 million today). Genius couldn't save him from the crowd's delusion. He was swept up in a mania he couldn't see while standing inside it.

But crowd madness isn't random. It follows a pattern: isolate people from independent thinking, add social pressure to conform, and wait. What emerges isn't wisdom, it's something far darker.

And crowd delusion isn’t confined to markets. It seeps into morality, beauty, and culture itself. For a thousand years, Chinese families were continuing a thousand-year practice of collective madness.

That same year Galton's fairgoers guessed the ox's weight, across the world, Chinese mothers were holding down their five-year-old daughters and breaking their feet.

They folded the girls' toes under their soles, then wrapped them in cloth strips so tight the bones would fuse into shapes three inches long. The children screamed and the mothers cried while doing it. But everyone agreed feet that were only 3 to 4 inches long were necessary for beauty, for marriage, for survival in society.

This wasn't the act of a few cruel families. For a thousand years, from the Song Dynasty to the early 20th century, hundreds of millions of girls endured this ritual. Mothers who had suffered it inflicted it on their daughters. The practice caused lifelong disability, excruciating pain, and shortened lifespans.

Yet, matchmakers demanded “lotus feet” and poets romanticized it. It was simply what civilized people did. The groupthink was so complete that the alternative, natural feet, seemed deviant, even shameful.

It took reformers decades to end the practice because the groupthink was multi-generational and civilization-wide.

💡 The Difference Between Wisdom and Madness

So what separated Galton's wise crowd from China's mad one?

Three conditions were present in Plymouth, absent in China:

Independence: People's opinions should not be influenced by those around them.

• Fairgoers guessed without conferring.

• Chinese mothers faced overwhelming social pressure.

Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of known facts.

• Fairgoers brought different perspectives.

• In China, aesthetic ideals became uniform across society.

Decentralization: People are able to specialize and use local knowledge.

• Fairgoers used local knowledge.

• Foot-binding became centralized through culture, enforced by matchmakers, romanticized by poets, demanded by marriage markets.

But remove these conditions and groupthink fills the vacuum.

At its core, groupthink results in adverse thinking and behavior when the rewards of conformity and consequences of dissent become sufficiently greater than the rewards and consequences of independent thinking.

Groupthink and the abandonment of independent judgment don’t arise solely from social pressures, they also emerge from material, professional, financial, status-based incentives, etc. that make conformity rational in the short term.

Groupthink isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of incentive design. When systems pay us more for fitting in than for thinking clearly, even smart people go blind together.

💡 How This Applies to Your Creativity

Collaboration is the bedrock of innovation. We brainstorm, we crowdsource, we seek consensus.

But every professional knows the dilemma. Should I trust my instinct or the group's judgment? Should I challenge consensus or defer to collective wisdom?

Crowds have produced Wikipedia, scientific breakthroughs, and accurate predictions. They've also perpetuated injustice, stifled innovation, and mistaken conformity for truth.

The answer is maddeningly context-dependent.

It's not whether you have a group, it's the conditions the group operates within. The conditions that separate wisdom from madness aren't mysteries. And you can recognize, diagnose, and change the conditions.

BLINKS, THINKS & LINKS

Curiosity Candy

• BBC's prof. Marcus du Sautoy explains how a group of people know more than one individual.
  

• A classroom experiment where students guessed the number of jelly beans in a jar; the group average was surprisingly accurate.
  

• Did You Know? When people make estimates independently, the average often beats any expert’s guess — but once they see others’ answers, accuracy collapses. In Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments, 75% of participants knowingly gave a wrong answer at least once just to match the group’s opinion.

ACTIONABLE PROMPTS

Stop Hoping for Good Group Collaboration

Steve Jobs said it would be "bigger than the internet." John Doerr called it more important than the PC. Dean Kamen's team believed cities would redesign around it. The reality was that the Segway was only used by mall cops.

Use structure to prevent groupthink effecting your team. The next time you gather people to make a decision, try this: assign explicit roles that force better conditions into existence.

1️⃣ Randomize who speaks first

• Draw names from a hat. Call on the intern. Use a random number generator. Whatever it takes to prevent the senior person from setting the agenda and everyone else from anchoring to it.

• Speaking order determines thinking order more than we admit.

2️⃣ Give someone the "Devil's Advocate" job

• Make it their actual assignment for the session.

• This normalizes dissent and removes its social cost. When disagreement is assigned, it stops being dangerous.

3️⃣ Declare "Local Experts" explicitly

• For each decision, identify who's closest to the reality of implementation: who talks to customers, reads the data, lives with the consequences.

• Give them official weight. Make it clear and known to the group.

These roles are building blocks— dissent, diversity, and decentralization— of a structure with conditions to optimize the achievements of group objectives.

Thanks for reading,

V.C. Hanna
Founder, Kreatio