Setting group priorities — Swarms vs votes

As established by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the statistical average of a group-wise vote will generally outperform the accuracy of the individual participants. Because of this, many organizations use polls and surveys for critical decisions, such as setting group priorities. Unfortunately, the conditions required by the Condorcet Jury Theorem are very strict, demanding (a) that participants are fully independent when casting votes, with no cross-team influences or social biasing, (b) that all members of the team are skilled performers who render correct decisions more than 50% of the time, and (c) that the questions are binary, with members selecting between only two options. A major problem, therefore, is that real world teams engaged in authentic decisions, judgements, and estimations rarely satisfy the ideal conditions for statistical accuracy amplification. The present study explores the use of “human swarming” as an alternative to polls and surveys for real-world tasks such as the setting of group priorities. More specifically, this study tasked a group of 43 voting age Americans with prioritizing a set of political objectives by vote and by swarm, and then asked the members to rate their satisfaction with the resulting prioritizations. It was found that 68% of the participants rated the swarm-based result as a more accurate reflection of their personal priorities than the vote-based result. In addition, 74% of participants rated the swarm-based result as a more accurate reflection of the group's priorities than the vote-based result. With satisfaction being a core success measure for a prioritization task, it appears that real-time swarming may offer groups a significant benefit as compared to traditional polls and surveys.