January 17, Second Sunday after Epiphany: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki names a bias with which most people live. “Most of us,” he writes, “whether as voters or investors or consumers or managers, believe that valuable knowledge is concentrated in a very few hands (or, rather, in a very few heads). We assume that the key to solving problems or making good decisions is finding that one right person who will have the answer.”

According to Surowiecki, we are very unlikely to trust a large crowd of people to be well informed, to make good decisions, or to be wise in any way. Perhaps that’s because we recognize that our own ordinary selves aren’t so reliable in making good predictions and aren’t so willing to undertake sophisticated cost-benefit analyses. More often than not, we allow emotion to affect our judgments. Why would we ever expect a large number of ordinary persons like ourselves to exhibit more intelligence or achieve better outcomes than the experts could?

Such suspicion of crowds has been exacerbated perhaps by our honest recognition that peer pressure or the dynamics of groupthink can wield additional powerful influences on our already feeble individual abilities. The recognition that group dynamics often shape the decisions we make and the actions we take for the worse has informed the views of many prominent thinkers throughout history.