Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the key features that make human cognition so successful is its social basis. The fact that we can exchangeinformation with others is integral to the knowledge humans have collectively built up over centuries. One place wherethis can readily be seen is in the aggregation of judgments. As is well documented, aggregates of individual judgmentsare often considerably more accurate than the individual judgments themselves, giving rise to so-called wisdom of thecrowd effects. A key determinant of the benefits of aggregation is the degree of dependency between judgments. Here, weprobed experimentally lay peoples understanding both of the value of aggregation and informational dependency, using anumerical prediction task. We found only an equivocal trend in people’s understanding of the value of aggregation, andno clear evidence of people’s understanding of the accuracy benefit of diversity.