The Benefit of Additional Opinions

Ilan Yaniv*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

170 Scopus citations

Abstract

In daily decision making, people often solicit one another's opinions in the hope of improving their own judgment. According to both theory and empirical results, integrating even a few opinions is beneficial, with the accuracy gains diminishing as the bias of the judges or the correlation between their opinions increases. Decision makers using intuitive policies for integrating others' opinions rely on a variety of accuracy cues in weighting the opinions they receive. They tend to discount dissenters and to give greater weight to their own opinion than to other people's opinions.

Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)75-78
Number of pages4
JournalCurrent Directions in Psychological Science
Volume13
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2004

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Psychological Bulletin , 91 , 517 – 539 . This research was supported by Grant No. 822 from the Israel Science Foundation. 1 More complex methods based on Bayes's theorem are less common in psychological research on combining opinions; hence, they are not treated here.
It was presented at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Center for the Study of Rationality as a Discussion paper, vol. no. 422, in 2006.

Keywords

  • Aggregating opinions
  • Combining information
  • Judgment and decision making

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