A Failure of Collective Intelligence

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of social influence on collective intelligence that causes the divergence of individual decisions from the expected collective decision. An important application of collective intelligence is national election predictions, which may encounter spectacular failures. While experts have provided various explanations, this paper posits that such influence among different types of voters is the primary reason. The 2015 UK Election as a case was studied, which demonstrates that such influence is intrinsic to collective intelligence. This paper then proposes a social influence-based prediction model to remedy these failures. Experiments demonstrate that the new model can account for the existence of such social influence.