Here are links to a couple of interesting videos, in which it is shown that the average of the guesses of a large number of people will be close to the right answer. The examples in these videos are of guesses of the weight of a cow and thenumber of jelly beans in a jar. While most guesses were off, some by a orders of magnitude, the median of the guesses were almost exactly right. It is astounding.

The wisdom of crowds is, apparently, often confused with crowd-sourcing. Although they sound the same and are related, they are different (see here for an explanation of the difference).

There has been work on how crowdsourcing can be used in development , but I don’t know if the wisdom of crowds has been used. Could it be used? Could we just ask 100 people to guess something that we want to know and then be reasonably confident in the average of the answer? How far out of peoples’ reality can you go and still get good answers. I don’t suppose typical crowds would provide you with good guesses on how many stars there are in the universe, or what the energy of Higgs Boson is... but could you ask how many times a year the doctors visit their village? How many people have latrines? Or of direct relevance to HealthBridge’s work in Togo, how many people use bednets? Answers to these sorts of questions would be susceptible to influence by “social desirability bias” - the tendency to respond to questions in a way that will be viewed favourably – or other biases and social pressures that the questioner is not aware of. So then we would be limited to asking questions that are close enough to a person’s reality that they could give a somewhat informed answer but far enough from them socially that their answer is not likely biased. So... what are we left with? I am not sure, but it is something to think about some more. Any ideas? In the meantime, I guess HealthBridge will continue old school, and conduct large scale household surveys to collect information on the respondents’ behaviours.